Hospices may be seeing a growing need for trauma-informed bereavement services on the horizon. Shaping their grief support programs with this trend in mind will be pivotal to hospices’ ability to expand the depth and reach of their services.

This is according to Chloe Bishop, bereavement and social work supervisor at Maryland-based Frederick Health Hospice. The community-based nonprofit provides hospice and palliative care, as well as grief support and veterans programs.

Among the significant challenges facing bereavement care teams in today’s hospice landscape is rising demand for trauma-informed grief support, Bishop said in a recent Hospice News Elevate podcast episode.

“We have responded to a growing awareness of the need for support with overdose loss and other traumatic losses as well, suicide [and] homicide losses,” Bishop told Hospice News during the podcast. “It’s not something that you think of [in] hospice bereavement. Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s going away. We’re going to continue to see a need for people who have lost someone in a traumatic way.”

The prevalence of trauma-related loss should be on hospices’ radar when it comes to the scope of their community bereavement programs, according to Bishop. These types of mortalities fall outside of the purview of the terminally ill patients that hospices typically serve. However, hospices are uniquely well-poised to offer these grieving communities substantial interdisciplinary support in a variety of ways, Bishop stated.

The need for trauma-informed grief approaches will not abate anytime soon, she indicated.

“I think we’re going to continue to see the trends that we’ve been seeing with the traumatic losses,” Bishop said.

A mounting volume of research backs this theory. At least one suicide-related death occurs every 11 minutes nationwide, reported the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Suicide is one of the leading causes of death in the country, the CDC report found.

Drug overdoses are also a leading cause of in the United States, according to the CDC. Overdose death rates have been increasing for the past several years, particularly among seniors 55 and older, the CDC reported.

Though homicide rates have fallen in recent years, the volume of other trauma-related mortality increased by nearly 22.8% from 2000 to 2010, a research analysis found. Trauma death rates saw the largest increases among seniors in their fifth and sixth decades of life during that decade, according to the analysis.

Hospices’ grief support services should include a trauma-informed approach, Bishop stated.

Frederick Health Hospice has increasingly received more community requests for one of its grief support programs that specifically addresses the needs of individuals who have experienced a tragic or traumatic loss, she said.

The program has grown in recent years, not only due to rising demand, but also funding support. The hospice has received a grant that will allow for stronger partnerships with other community organizations to expand the trauma-informed bereavement program’s reach.

“That [grant] allowed us to partner with first responders to help them understand how they can be supportive in those situations where they’re responding to an overdose,” Bishop told Hospice News. “It was an opportunity for psychoeducation on our part. Also, they would then refer to our services, so that we could follow up with the families or loved ones of the person who had died. That’s an area where we’ve seen a lot of need, and so we sought out a way to help address it, or help partner and wrap those people in support.”

Having a better understanding of the scope of trauma-related loss can help hospices hone their community-based grief services, Bishop stated. The unique challenges that bereaved families face with trauma-related losses can present opportunities for hospices to form creative, innovative strategies that help address these needs, she said.

Trauma-informed grief programs can help strengthen a hospice’s ties with community organizations, local educators and other health care providers, Bishop indicated. These bereavement programs have presented a “huge growth opportunity” for Frederick Health Hospice to gain a better understanding of its community needs.

“A lot of the challenges are actually the opportunities,” Bishop said. “Seeing the amount of traumatic loss and people reaching out for support … That’s an opportunity to become innovative as a staff. What can we do to help this? What can we do to address it? Who can we work with in our community? What are the needs?”