Bereavement needs assessment – Piloting a process

The quest for an effective and appropriate way of identifying those people who are susceptible to a poor outcome in their grief has engaged researchers and practitioners in the field of palliative care over an extended period of time. Within the Mount Vernon Cancer Network, healthcare professionals with a mutual interest in bereavement, set out to devise a new bereavement assessment tool to meet some of the changing practice and policy challenges. They decided to use the Range of Response to Loss model as the basis for an assessment tool. The Range of Response to Loss Bereavement Self-Assessment tool (RRL BSA) is made up of paired self-report statements on a Likert scale spectrum from resilient to vulnerable and is completed by a client in order to assess the level of their bereavement need. An evaluation of the RRL BSA tool, from a practitioner perspective, was carried out over a 6-month period during 2012. Seven healthcare provider organizations took part in the initial pilot and 53 assessments were completed. Practitioners participating in the pilot believed that the responses to the assessment tool accurately reflect the level of the clients’ bereavement needs. It was, therefore, seen as appropriate to initiate a wider use of the tool. Further studies are planned to explore the client perspectives and its use in other settings, its use on the telephone, and as a continuing monitoring and outcome tool.