Understanding Loss & Grief

This Understanding Loss and Grief Home Study course provides effective training support for anyone who works with the bereaved, and will prove particularly useful in the helping and caring professions.

Course description:

• This Understanding Loss and Grief Home Study course provides effective training support for anyone who works with the bereaved, and will prove particularly useful in the helping and caring professions. The material helps trainees understand the nature of loss and grief and its impact on both those who grieve and those who care for them.
• Offering support to someone who is suffering from loss or bereavement is a tremendous challenge, both personally and professionally. This course provides guidance and advice for anyone whose work brings them into contact with the bereaved and is particularly suitable if you are working in a helping or caring profession.

Course content:Unit 1: What is loss?

• Loss as a continuous life process
• Some models of loss
• Death as a taboo - an historical perspective
• Taking responsibility for support

Unit 2: 'Dying is an art'

• Where people die
• A good death?
• Euthanasia or assisted suicide
• Losses for the dying; losses for the carer
• Meeting the needs of the dying and their carers
• Awareness of dying
• Two models of dying
• The dying person's Bill of Rights
• Declaration of Rights of people with cancer
  Case studies

Unit 3: Grief work

• "Grief work” the thinking of Sigmund Freud
• Melanie Klein and internalisation
• Bowlby's attachment theory
• Anticipatory grief
• Cultural patterns in grief

Unit 4: Models of grief (1)

• Theories and models of grief
• Worden's four tasks of mourning
• Murray-Parkes' concept of psycho-social transition in loss
• Murray-Parkes' four stages of grieving ”a sequential model"
• Benefits and drawbacks of linear models of grief

Unit 5: Models of grief (2)

• The validity of linear models of grief and further thoughts
• Determinants of grief
• Stroebe's 'dual process' model of grief
• Marris's sociological perspective on grief

Unit 6: How do we grieve?

• Manifestations of grief
• Expression of grief
• Implications for support / four types of support

Unit 7: The grief of parents and children

• The nature of childhood grief
• The child's concept of death
• Adult attitudes to children's grief
• The child's expression of grief
• Loss and change for the bereaved child
• Adolescent grief
• Parental grief

Unit 8: Complex and complicated grief

• Complex and complicated grief
• Indicators of abnormal grief
• Absence of grief
• Chronic grief
• Complicated or complex grief
• The role of medication in grief
• Factors complicating grief

Unit 9: Special considerations

• Special considerations
• Suicide
• Sexuality and bereavement
• Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
• Grief after voluntary euthanasia (assisted suicide)

Unit 10: In memoriam

• Immortality & some interpretations
• The funeral
• Children and funerals
• The epitaph
• Humour and death

Unit 11: New thinking on Loss and Grief

• Revisiting ideas
• Looking at more recent thinking
• Getting over it
• The growing around grief model
• Bereavement and Biography
• Cognitive Behavioural Therapy
• Object Relations Theory

Qualification information:

At the end of this course successful learners will be awarded a completion certificate.

Method of study:

Online Version

Our online A-Level courses are fully digitised versions of the paper-courses, so you can study on any PC or smart device when connected to the internet.

As with the paper course, your online learning programme is completely flexible, so you can study at a pace that suits you.

All of our online course content is broken down into bite size chunks to make your learning more manageable and effective.

Method of assessment:

The course contains a number of assignments which your tutor will mark and give you valuable feedback on. We call these Tutor Marked Assignments (TMAs). You need only send the TMAs to your tutor for comment, not the self-assessment exercises which are also part of the course to help you gauge your progress.

Course length information:

This course can be taken over a 12 month period but you can complete it as fast or as slowly as you wish.

Tutor support:

You will have access to a tutor via email who will mark your work, guide you through the course and assist you with any problems you may have. In addition you will be supplied with a comprehensive Study Guide which will help you through the study and assessment process.

Currently there are no Q&As for this course. Be the first to ask a question.