Structural Supports for Agencies and Staff

Description of this Session: This Teleconference will focus on Agencies and the need to build understanding about the value of being a supportive grief environment and of becoming grief supportive communities.

Goals:

1. To establish procedures, services, policies, and protocols that care for loss and mourning needs;

2. To raise awareness and understanding of the meaning and impact of losses, and the healing that may be achieved in mourning.

The experience of a death influences the inner life and expressive behavior of a person in the deepest, most enduring ways. When a death (or other significant loss) occurs, it reverberates powerfully in the heart and in psychological existence. We will discuss how agencies structures can be grief supportive.

Program areas covered:

Agency Loss Team
Agency self-assessment of loss experiences
Client loss assessment
Supporting staff as a way of cultivating an agency climate of grief support
Staff turnover
Staff training programs
Placement: crisis and process
Aging and illness
Client education
Families
Loss and death in the life of an agency

Speaker:

Jeffrey Kauffman, Psychotherapist and Consultant. Jeffrey Kauffman has taught at Bryn Mawr College and Widener University. He is a Certified Thanatologist, Certified Addictions Specialist, Board Certified Diplomate in Clinical Social Work, Board Certified Expert In Traumatic Stress. He maintains a psychotherapy practice near Philadelphia, specializing in grief and trauma for persons with Intellectual Disabilities and others. He is author of more than 35 articles and books on death and dying, including, the Handbook on Helping Persons with Mental Retardation Mourn. He has consulted for 40 Developmental Disability agencies, providing clinical services for individuals, agency interventions for loss, program development, and training. He has lectured extensively nationally and internationally.

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