Extending our reach: telehealth delivered grief support groups for rural hospice

The purpose of this pilot project was to develop, implement, and evaluate a distance-technology delivered grief support group program for grieving persons in underserved rural/frontier communities in Utah. This project was a collaboration between an established university-based grief support program, the (blinded) Telehealth Network and with one primary nonprofit hospice (blinded) and two secondary nonprofit hospice agencies (blinded) serving underserved/rural-frontier communities. We evaluated program feasibility (recruitment, retention, acceptability, tolerability, clinician trainability, and stakeholder satisfaction) and participant grief outcomes. Distance delivered grief groups compared favorably to face-to-face groups and met an unmet need for bereaved hospice families.