Call for GPs to share experiences of grief and loss to “gain understanding”

 A GP and end-of-life care champion is calling on fellow family doctors to share their experiences of grief and loss in a bid to create a resource to support medical professionals in future.  

Dr Catherine Millington-Sanders, Royal College of GPs (RCGP) and Marie Curie National End of Life Care Clinical Champion, aims to collate the stories into a book in a bid to support professionals in sharing grief openly, in particular in light of increased exposure to dying, death and bereavement since March during the Covid-19 pandemic.  

Last year, Marie Curie and the RCGP launched the Daffodil Standards designed to support primary care teams in delivering care to patients living with an advanced, serious illness or at the end of their lives, and their loved ones. 

Now Dr Millington-Sanders wants to collect stories of GPs’ front line experiences, to help support colleagues to deliver palliative and end of life care..

“The COVID-19 pandemic has underlined several important experiences that make the timing of this type of book pertinent to our everyday work,” says Dr Millington-Sanders. 

“First, there is massive public support and sympathy for health care workers as they tackle the worst effects of the epidemic – dying, death, and grief. 

“Secondly, the exposure to dying, death, and grief of our patients has increased considerably since the arrival of the pandemic. Not only must we manage our grief from the loss of our own patients but also the concurrent grief of colleagues in the same situation. 

“Finally, it is well-known that grief in professional circles is difficult to share openly. And yet it is difficult to gain understanding of how others feel, what they are thinking, how similar or dissimilar their experiences are to our own, unless these experiences are widely shared. A crucial part of support and comfort is knowing that your experiences are understood and shared. This is the foundation stone of genuine empathy.”

 Dr Millington-Sanders wants GPs to submit their personal stories – either of their own grief or the grief of a patient – to put together a volume that would be a “key resource in helping GPs and other health and social care colleagues make sense of their experiences of grief and loss in the everyday world of their professional practice”. 

One emotive example already shared with Catherine opens: “And how are you coping with all this?’ he asked, looking deep into my eyes which immediately welled with tears. “…people don’t usually ask the carer”.  In that moment I learnt the importance of acknowledging the stress of being the supporter/wife/partner/carer of someone who was dying. The enquirer, my father, a GP with many decades of experience who left Primary Care to become the Medical Director of Hospice in the early 90s. The person dying was my husband and I was a GP with a lot to learn.” 

Anyone wishing to submit an account should, within a 1000 word limit, describe their own mixture of personal and professional reactions to patient and colleague death, loss and grief.  

This could be a reflection of a single case or several and from any time, not limited to experiences during Covid-19.  Submissions can be written anonymously, with a pen name or with your own name, but all patient and colleague information should be anonymised.

 All submissions will be accepted, but final acceptance is dependent on quality, number, and suitability of the individual submissions eventually received.  

 Submission deadline is November 23 and should be sent to

catherine.millington-sanders@rcgp.org.uk

If you’d like to find out more about the Marie Curie/RGCP Daffodil Standards and how your GP Surgery can sign up, visit www.rcgp.org.uk/clinical-and-research/resources/a-to-z-clinical-resources/daffodil-standards.aspx