P3.I177: Virtual support for bereaved parents: Acceptability, feasibility, and preliminary efficacy of HOPE Group

Purpose/Objectives: Bereaved parents demonstrate increased risk for long-term psychological problems and poorer overall quality of life. Bereavement support programs, hospital mailings, grief apps, and relationships with other parents who have experienced loss have all shown positive impacts on parental grief. However, many barriers exist in delivery of these interventions, with less than half of pediatric intensive care teams implementing grief and bereavement care. Virtual programs may help to address some of these barriers (e.g., families’ physical distance to the hospital, trauma reactions when exposed to setting where child received care). The Division of Palliative Medicine at Nemours Children’s Hospital, Delaware (NCH-D) implemented the HOPE (Healing Opportunities through Parental Exchange) Group, a virtual bereavement support group for caregivers of children who were treated at NCH-D prior to the child’s death. The objective of this quality improvement study was to examine acceptability, feasibility, and preliminary efficacy of HOPE Group.

Design/Methods: HOPE Group is a six-week virtual program informed by theories emphasizing post-traumatic growth and personal resilience to foster greater connection among bereaved parents. Parents were eligible to participate in HOPE Group if they had lost a child within the previous five years. HOPE Group was conceptualized as weekly, time-limited (capped at 6 sessions), and closed, to foster greater connection between participants and create a safe atmosphere in which to be vulnerable about one’s grief experiences. Participants completed The Hogan Grief Reaction Checklist (HGRC) and the Grief and Meaning Reconstruction Inventory (GMRI) pre- and post-intervention. At post-intervention, participants also completed measures assessing intervention acceptability and feasibility. Paired samples t-tests were used to examine changes in HGRC and GMRI scores, and descriptive statistics were used to summarize perspectives on intervention acceptability and feasibility.

Results: Participants included 19 bereaved caregivers (Mage = 40.27 years; 83% women; 72% non-Hispanic White). Participants endorsed high satisfaction with both the intervention and the use of technology for intervention delivery. All participants found the timing of sessions convenient and most reported that the number of sessions, length of sessions, and group size were appropriate (67%, 83%, and 83%, respectively). Nearly all participants agreed that they learned or gained something from the HOPE Group that will help them in their grief journey (92%). All participants (100%) agreed that the virtual format was acceptable and improved their access to grief support. Participants demonstrated moderate gains on the Personal Growth subscale of the GMRI (p=.03, d=.66) and significantly improved quality of life from pre- to post-intervention (p=.02, d=.77).

Conclusion/Discussion: Findings reveal that HOPE Group is acceptable, feasible, and may positively impact grief processing and quality of life for bereaved parents. Future research with larger and more diverse samples is needed to better understand the utility of virtual bereavement support programs.