A Look into Grief Education (or Lack Thereof) From a Physician’s Viewpoint

It’s not unusual to hear physicians say they pursued medicine because they wanted to cure diseases and help others. A lot of times, this is even rooted in personal experiences they’ve witnessed. And let me be clear, I think this is an incredible motivation. But what happens when there is no cure? How do we prepare physicians to sit with the realities of death, dying, and grief? In my opinion, we need to greatly strengthen grief education for physicians to allow better support both for their patients and themselves.

During my first year of medical school, I volunteered with a local hospice agency. For those who may not know, hospice is medical care focused on comfort rather than cure. It’s provided by a diverse team of social workers, chaplains, volunteers, nurses, and clinicians for people whose physicians believe their life expectancy is six months or less. I also want to note that patients can remain in hospice longer than six months if the clinical picture continues to support that prognosis. Anyway, as part of my hospice volunteer training, I watched a video about the origins of hospice care. I wish I could find it again, and I apologize that I can’t recall the title, but one moment from that video has stayed with me throughout my education and now my practice. In it, a physician speaking to a class of first-year medical students asked, “How many of your patients are going to die?” Surprisingly, the students all answered “zero,” explaining that their goal was to learn everything they could to cure all their patients. This was eye-opening to me as I recognized that death is part of life, and ultimately, all my patients will die someday. 

I bring this up not to fault those students, but to highlight the mindset shaped by medical education and the culture of scientific advancement that encourages physicians to focus on curing as much as possible. Physicians are taught, year after year, to focus on curing, preventing, and fixing. But that moment in the film highlighted for me the glaring absence of education around death and grief, an absence I believe is crucial for physicians to address. An absence that can cause harm to our patients and their loved ones if physicians are not trained on how to communicate when grief is involved.

Broadly, physicians are not trained or prepared to talk about grief with patients or their families. While there have been efforts to increase grief education in medical school and residency, it often appears only as a piece of broader death-related curricula. Very few programs offer dedicated grief-support training. Most existing grief education focuses on ethical, legal, or symptom-management aspects of care rather than communication skills or understanding the full, inclusive spectrum of grief.

Right now, grief support in healthcare primarily falls to psychologists, counselors, and social workers, and they do incredible work. But if we truly want to improve care for patients and families and sustain physicians working in grief-heavy areas of medicine, we need to prepare physicians before they experience grief in their practice, not hope they piece it together afterward. Grief is part of life, and physicians walk with patients through all of life, so it only makes sense for it to be part of medical training.

In recent years, some medical schools or medical specialties have begun requiring medical students and medical residents to rotate through hospice or palliative medicine, a field focused on helping patients with serious illness feel better through symptom management and value-aligned decision making. Some hospitals are training physicians to communicate effectively in difficult conversations. Some medical schools have created longitudinal grief curricula. And more research is emerging about the importance of grief and bereavement education in medicine. I’m optimistic that, with these changes, more physicians will have the space to learn about grief and carry that understanding into their practice. But there is still work to be done.

I don’t raise this topic to excuse poor experiences people may have had involving physicians and grief. Instead, I hope to illuminate how gaps in grief education have shaped those experiences, how the field is working to address them, and how much room we still have to grow. My hope is for grief education to be woven into medical education. Ideally, from day one of class. The sooner we normalize and acknowledge grief for medical professionals, the sooner we can provide tools for medical professionals to be prepared for their first professional encounters with grief. I aim to name grief when I see it in a medical encounter and provide space for this. 

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