Kim Clarke, a Principal Cardiac Genetic Counsellor at Birmingham Women’s and Children’s Hospital, shares how she and colleagues benefitted from Child Bereavement UK’s bespoke training. 

We felt so fortunate to be able to do this training developed around our needs with Child Bereavement UK.

As a cardiac genetic counsellor, I support families when someone in the family has an inherited cardiac condition and/or where there is history of cardiac arrests and premature death.

I’m part of a group of cardiac genetic counsellors from across the UK that meets regularly. We had identified that although there are lots of conferences and training courses available, particularly around the scientific aspect of our role, there were none that focused on the psychosocial aspect. We wanted to get back to the basics - the core counselling skills we need to use when seeing families at a really difficult time.

We approached Child Bereavement UK’s training team and asked if this was something they could provide. They asked us to specify what we wanted and the group suggested topics they were interested in learning more about; these including understanding how to support families when a child dies unexpectedly; ways to communicate with bereaved parents; understanding how siblings grieve; and exploring helpful and unhelpful things to say to bereaved families. We also wanted to learn more about preparing families for the Child Death Review process and talking to families about paediatric postmortem.

Using our suggestions, Child Bereavement UK developed a bespoke training day for us: 'Loss and Bereavement Skills for Genetic Counsellors'. What we really valued was that the training incorporated situations relevant to our practice, which were woven into the session. We also had opportunities to go into breakout rooms to discuss how we would handle a particular situation with a family too, which was really helpful. We discussed how to talk to families who have experienced a sudden death in the family, those who have been made aware of an underlying genetic condition that could affect other family members, and those coping with an unexplained death where no genetic cause is found.

We also learned about theories and models of grief such as Tonkin's in which your grief remains the same size but the rest of your life grows around it. We also learned that bereaved children tend to ‘puddle jump’, moving in and out of their grief as a way to cope with powerful feelings. This really resonated with me and after the session colleagues said they also found learning about these models of grief really beneficial and that this knowledge would support their practice. We felt so fortunate to be able to do this training developed around our needs with Child Bereavement UK.

Find out more about our bespoke training.

---

Visit our training section for upcoming training events and information about bespoke training for your workplace.