Social work with dying and bereaved clients: helping the workers.

This paper considers the stresses and satisfactions experienced by health care social workers as they help clients with grief and loss at a time of great fiscal restraint. Their clients face life-threatening illnesses such as AIDS and many forms of cancer. There are untimely losses in families and communities whose resources are dwindling. As social workers confront struggles with death and bereavement, they may receive limited support to deal with these stresses in their work. The authors suggest administrative strategies both to help workers reduce stress and increase satisfactions and to demonstrate the value of social work services to dying and bereaved clients along a continuum of health care.