Grief is a normal part of life, according to Kathie Supiano, a University of Utah nursing professor. While many people can integrate the loss of a loved one into their life and move forward, some might lack the resources, support systems or coping skills to grieve well.
Supiano and Caring Connections, a nonprofit within the University of Utah College of Nursing, are dedicated to helping people grieve better through research, support groups, manuals and trainings. Their work addresses everything from grief associated with deaths due to natural disease to grief over sudden or traumatic deaths.
Caring Connections can care for several hundred people a year in group sessions and has also trained a thousand clinicians in the model. “When we train people in our model and they bring this work to their own agency or their own clinical practices, we've impacted many more people,” Supiano said.
Thanks to two large grants from the state of Utah, Caring Connections is able to provide its suicide and overdose trainings and manuals for free to programs that enroll in the research study. These specific offerings are extremely relevant and important to a state with a high rate of death by overdose and suicide.
One of the most successful implementations of the program that Supiano can point to is in the Utah State Prison. The group is run by social workers who work in corrections and have experience managing the mental health needs of the people in the prison. “Adding this grief group to the toolkit of interventions will allow people, as they're approaching release from prison, to have the grief or trauma addressed that might have led to their criminal behavior or their substance use and substance abuse,” Supiano said. “If we can address that back story of loss, that's a huge impact.”
Now Caring Connections is hoping to expand beyond the University of Utah and the state to help even more clinicians and agencies. Expanding the grief training program meant the Caring Connections team would also need to expand their skill set.
They knew they would need to develop a plan around protecting their trainings and manuals after an earlier experience finding out the manuals were being copied and shared without their permission. This introduced them to the realm of copyrights and the Technology Licensing Office.
They registered the copyrights for the existing manuals with the help of the Technology Licensing Office and are currently working on a plan for the newer manuals that will be rolled out soon.
“Even though we're part of the university, we're a little nonprofit, and we could have never done this on our own,” Supiano said. “The idea of having to go find a lawyer is something we just simply wouldn't have done because it's too big to do.”
On top of protecting their materials, the team is also looking for a platform to assist with training and determining a fair pricing strategy for groups outside of Utah.
“Working with a professional office like the Technology Licensing Office elevates not just the visibility but quality of our work because we have more people with their eyes on the product,” Supiano said.