Process of Adapting the Family Bereavement Program for Widespread Use in Bereavement Agencies

This presentation will describe the process of adapting the Family Bereavement Program into a user-friendly, sustainable program. Also, the collaborative, user-centered approach we are using will be discussed and several components of the program will be presented.

Two structural parameters of the agencies determined key redesign decisions: the nature of the agencies’ staff and length of their child-focused programs. First, most staff are volunteers who commit a few hours each week to run programs. To drastically reduce preparation time, we changed the delivery format from manual-driven to web-based. In this model, the skills are taught using videos embedded in power point slides and the leaders facilitate discussions of the skills, coach parents in practicing them and assign home practice to use the skills with their children. Given that volunteer leaders often do not have clinical training, an initial, 3-day, in-person training program is being developed to ensure that leaders are competent in coaching parents in effective skill use. Also, during the first delivery, leaders will participate in weekly training and supervision using video conferencing and complete weekly web-based training. Second, because we viewed concurrent parent and child programs as a way to increase attendance, we needed to shorten the session length to match that of the child-focused programs. This led to a decision to offer some material that had been presented in the sessions on the web/smart phones. The web/smart-phone platform will include all the information presented in the sessions, workbooks with tips for using the skills effectively, forms for recording how home practice activities went, resource materials and a discussion board.

Four agencies that were diverse in the ethnicity and social economic background of their clients were selected as collaborators. One leader and one parent from each agency are participating in three 2-day meetings where prototypes of the revised materials have been/will be discussed in focus groups. The program developers have used this feedback about the first two modules of the program to revise the materials, which were then reviewed by the collaborators. To illustrate the adapted program, examples of the revised materials for the first two modules will be presented.

The adapted program will be evaluated in a quasi-experimental design in these four agencies. It is expected that the program will lead to significant improvements in children’s and parent’s mental health problems and distressing grief and that the agencies’ positive experience with the program will facilitate its dissemination.