Grief Awareness Week 2024
Our loss and bereavement training is all about giving staff in health and social care skills and tools to support people with a learning disability who are experiencing grief. In this blog we share more about this double-award winning training and the thoughts of Jess Hiles, who draws on our support and is one of the co-trainers.
It’s two years now since Jess Hiles, Nicola Payne and Beth Britton were co-designing what has become our double-award winning Loss and Bereavement training in collaboration with ARC England.
First delivered in March 2023 (read more about the creation of the training and the first session in Care Talk, pages 54-55) numerous sessions have since been delivered to ARC England members and non-members, staff from an NHS Trust and to MacIntyre teams, with the workshop described by one learner recently as: "Outstanding training."
Everyone from commissioners and managers to support workers have undertaken the training, walking away with a better understanding of how loss and bereavement can affect a person with a learning disability and how they can provide responsive, person-centred support to the individual, as well as how to look after themselves and their teams as crucial members of the health and social care workforce.
As a learner commented recently: “It was an amazing training delivered perfectly. Thank you."
Why EVERYONE should have loss and bereavement training
"Really great to take time out to discuss such an important subject. Great session." (feedback from a learner)
There aren’t many universal experiences that everyone in the population has, but at some point everyone will experience loss and/or bereavement. You may only be thinking about this in the obvious way - the death of a person - but there are so many more aspects to loss and bereavement, including terminal diagnosis, the loss of routines or items that are special to us, and the death of a pet.
Loss and bereavement is both a complex subject and a unifying one. We’ve found on our training that everyone has something to contribute to the discussions, and even if as a health or social care professional you’ve never supported a person who is going through loss and bereavement, the chances are you will at some point, or indeed have experiences in your personal life that will be navigated better if you have some awareness of types of loss, facts about grieving, an understanding of the grief cycle and practical ideas to support someone else or yourself. We’ve really aimed to break down barriers with this training, and you can read more about that here.
Loss and bereavement resources we signpost to
We share a myriad of facts, thoughts, ideas and approaches in our workshops, meaning there is truly something for everyone to take away and use, with one learner commenting recently:
"Really useful workshop, I think we will definitely be using the links and resources discussed today. Thank you."
We do activities using quizzes, sticky notes and case studies, watch films and provide an extensive list of links. A learner recently said:
"It was very helpful, reading the case study and listening to lived experience. It gave me a lot to think about.”
To give you a flavour of what to expect on our training, we’ve picked out three resources we love that could help you if you’re approaching topics around death, dying and bereavement for the first time:
1) Jess’ Makaton cards and films weren’t in our original March 2023 training session, simply because they hadn’t been created then. We continually refine the training as we deliver it to different audiences and receive learners feedback, and it was an absolute pleasure to add in Jess’ fantastic work this year.
Jess spent hours creating her cards and films with our Health Team colleague Rachel Furniss, and these free resources deserve to be used far and wide so do take a look
2) It’s well-known that we love Books Beyond Words at MacIntyre (read about our book clubs), and the Books Beyond Words titles on grief and bereavement are always signposted to in our training. They are a fantastic resource that allows the person supported to tell the story in their own way - what could be a more empowering way to deal with the tough topic of death and dying than that?
Having the voice of lived experience running through our training is really important to us. Jess being a co-trainer is the most important aspect of this, but we also like to hear from other people with learning disabilities. Gary Butler features twice in our training, including in this film talking about Breaking Bad News
Do take a look - we love Gary’s messages and learners in all of our sessions do too as someone told us on their post-course feedback this autumn:
"Definitely useful hearing from Jess and the videos of people sharing their experiences were really useful too."
More recent feedback from learners
Speaking of our learners, gathering feedback from our training is really important to us as a team so we can learn and develop. It’s also lovely to be able to share learner’s post-training thoughts and feelings with Jess, because we know her impact as a trainer is so profound. Some recent feedback we’ve had includes:
“It was very useful to hear from a person with lived experience, Jess was great!"
"Especially to Jess. Your confidence shines, thank you for sharing with us all today. Thank you too to Beth and Nicola, it’s been great."
"Very useful to hear from Jess. How bereavement can affect an individual in different ways."
"Absolutely Brilliant. Co-training is definitely best. It's better to listen to someone with lived experience."
"Jess was/is a STAR and her input and inclusion was very helpful."
Jess’ thoughts on the first two years of her training partnership with Nicky and Beth
We wanted to finish this blog by asking Jess about her experiences of training staff teams in loss and bereavement. Has it been tough? Has she had fun? Here’s what Jess told us:
“I like doing this training because I want people to listen to us more. It can be emotional but I have loads of fun too.”
Want to join Jess, Nicky and Beth on a future loss and bereavement training session?
Find out more about our loss and bereavement training from ARC England
