Kassner, PhD, Colorado Hospice Organization, Colorado Springs, Colorado, and Julie Thomas, MA, LPC, HospiceCare of Boulder and Broomfield Counties, Colorado, in their presentation titled, "The Colorado Hospice Bereavement Project and Software," an assessment provides "the groundwork for bereavement care services and should address family and significant others' grief and bereavement responses and needs on physical, emotional, social and spiritual levels
" In addition, Dr. Kassner and Ms. Thomas asserted that it is important to also identify family strengths and stressors and their Colorado Bereavement Assessment was proposed as a model assessment tool.
In addition to individual factors, determining how the family interacts and how each member works to support the family system in times of significant stress and change are important components of the assessment process. Helping Families Cope and Adapt.
John Schneider's work on Transformative Grief[4] was cited by Dr. Johnson as providing a helpful structure for both understanding grieving families and providing appropriate intervention to help them cope and adapt to the loss within their system. Schneider poses important questions for consideration, underscoring that the questions must both be asked and answered in order to effectively cope with and adapt to loss.
Questions to be Asked and Answered.
1. What have we lost?.
2. What do we have left?.
3. What may still be possible for us?.
As families work to address these questions, they begin to recognize that they must be "reorganized" and that it will be necessary, over time, for the members to "reinvest" in a "new" family configuration and system that will be created without the deceased.
Essential to this adaptation process is communication, which Dr. Johnson identified as the most important element in a family's ability to adapt. Acknowledging the reality of the loss and experiencing it collectively requires that family members be both willing and able to communicate with each other.
