Grief support and empathy education is so important in the context of value-based health care as it connects us to our own humanity.  It speaks to why we entered into the altruistic practice of providing care, yet our fee-for-service model overvalues transactional activities without a whole-person orientation.  This leads to medical professionals becoming detached from the grieving process of patients, families, and caregivers and results in our own moral injury along the way. Providers who lack an understanding in the grieving process or fail to adequately express empathy will also have patients with diminished clinical care outcomes.  Moreover, doctors without empathy are more likely to get sued for malpractice compared to doctors who make the same mistake but do emphasize the human connection.

In this week’s episode, we invited one of the leading experts in grief and empathy, Lisa Keefauver to discuss a health system’s role in supporting patients, families, and caregivers through the grieving process. Lisa is the Founder & CEO of Reimagining Grief and is working to shift the narratives of grief at the individual, community, and organizational levels. Her wisdom as a grief and empathy leader runs deep and wide, rooted in her personal and professional experiences over the past 20+ years. You can find out more about Lisa’s work at her website: https://reimagininggrief.com/