Grief counselling in context: Multiple roles and professional compromise

The issues involved in the use of counselling skills and approaches by members of professions such as nursing and social work have received relatively little research attention. Grief counselling represents an appropriate area in which to explore these issues, since members of many diverse professional groups may be called on to work therapeutically or supportively with the bereaved. This paper explores the use of grief counselling in a variety of professional and voluntary contexts, through an analysis of the experience of students who had undertaken a bereavement counselling course. The aim of the study was to explore the level of awareness shown by employing organisations to the 'loss' element of client experience, and the implications of organisational context for the role of counsellor as a worker responding to client grief. A range of practice characteristics emerged. At one end of the spectrum was clearly focused and contracted grief counselling, usually within the context of specialist voluntary agencies. By contrast, there were practitioners whose counselling response to grief was concealed within a multi-professional perspective characterised by compromise, usually working in complex organisational contexts in the statutory sector. It is argued that the range of practitioner activity cannot be understood simply by describing some activities as counselling and others as the use of counselling skills; it seems that there is a real and sometimes subtle middle ground which lies between the two. This is territory which is determined by the context of practice and needs to be understood and defined as such