A Postvention Process For Supporting Clinicians Navigating the Death of a Client
Mini Workshop 10 - A Postvention Process for Supporting Clinicians Navigating the Death of a Client
Saturday, November 19, 2022
8:00 AM – 9:30 AM EST
Location: Astor Ballroom, 7th Floor
Earn 1.5 CE Credit
Keywords: Training / Training Directors, Supervision, Suicide Level of Familiarity: Moderate Recommended Readings: Veilleux, J. C., & Bilsky, S. A. (2016). After a client death: Suicide postvention recommendations for training programs and clinics. Training and Education in Professional Psychology, 10(4), 214–222. https://doi.org/10.1037/tep0000127 Dexter-Mazza, E. T., & Freeman, K. A. (2003). Graduate training and the treatment of suicidal clients: The students’ perspective. Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior, 33(2), 211–218. https://doi.org/10.1521/suli.33.2.211.22769 Urmanche, A. A. (2020). Bearing witness to the epidemic: Supporting clinicians after a client overdose death. Practice Innovations, 5(4), 275–289. https://doi.org/10.1037/pri0000115
Assistant Professor University of Mississippi Oxford, Mississippi
A sizeable percentage of therapists experience the death of a therapy client at some point during their careers, a phenomena that unfortunately trainees are not immune to. Although some training programs and clinics are prepared to help clinicians navigate client loss, many do not have evidence-based procedures in place, which makes them vulnerable to acting reactively (rather than thoughtfully) in the face of a client death. In this workshop, we will present a postvention procedure that was crafted from the best available evidence on responding to client death in medical settings, as well as retrospective research on therapists who lost clients to suicide. We will discuss the rationale for a two-step postvention process, with the first stage focused on providing support to the clinician in terms of normalizing the grief process and discussing differences between loss in personal versus professional contexts. The second stage is most applicable to client death via suicide or overdose and involves a critical incident review of the case with the aim of updating policies to best support client care. We will discuss decisions around notification of the client loss to other clinicians, and decisions around communicating with the client’s family. We will describe methods of navigating support to the clinician while attending to multiple and sometimes conflicting roles (e.g., supervisor, clinic administration, other trainees). Throughout, we will emphasize the importance of candid but compassionate discussion of client death, and we will discuss the impacts of different types of death (e.g., suicide and overdose, accidental death, anticipated death) on clinicians. This workshop is geared primarily toward training faculty, clinic directors, supervisors and administrators (i.e., those in positions of power over front-line clinicians), but front-line clinicians and clinician-trainees are also welcome. This workshop will focus on strategies for implementing a postvention process pre-emptively, recognizing the unfortunate but realistic likelihood of most clinics encountering a client death.
Learning Objectives:
At the end of the session, the learner will be able to:
Identify common reactions to the death of a client.
Describe best practices for postvention procedures.
Design postvention procedures for their training clinic/clinical settings.
Generate ideas for supporting clinicians/trainees following the death of a client.