Irish Hospice Foundation are now accepting applications for the 2024/2025 Professional Certificate in Children and Loss (Level 9).
Applications are invited from professionals whose work brings them into contact with children who are bereaved through a family death or parental separation. The course will be of interest to social workers, teachers, chaplains, social care workers, psychologists, counsellors and others who meet bereaved children in their work.
This Professional Certificate in Children and Loss course aims to equip professionals who work with children/adolescents with the skills to understand and support them when grieving. When a child experiences loss, either through death or a parental separation, their needs are often misunderstood or overlooked. Children may express their grief in ways that are different to adults, and often their reactions can go unrecognised.
The programme aims to equip students with the knowledge, skills, attitudes and values to:
- Demonstrate a critical understanding of core theories and ethical underpinnings of children and young people’s experiences of death loss and non-death loss in their lives and associated losses and changes.
- Determine the central principles essential to organisational and personal support while working with bereaved children and young people experiencing a death loss or non-death loss in their lives.
- Evaluate the impact of a range of losses and changes and how they may be experienced by children and young people at different developmental stages of their lives as a consequence of a death loss or non-death loss, whilst acknowledging the influence of diverse family and inter-generational histories and vulnerabilities, as well as the deprivation associated with systemic and social inequalities.
- Appropriately assess the resilience of bereaved children and young people as well as their familial and community supports taking account of structural and personal vulnerabilities and mitigating circumstances.
- Justify appropriate level 1 and level 2 interventions (ICBN, 2014) for children and young people according to their needs.
- Apply new knowledge and skills into professional practice.
- Reflect on professional development and personal growth through the educational experience.
- Exhibit an integrated, value-based, inclusive and evidence-based approach to the support of children and young people after a death or non-death loss in their lives.
Find out more information here