Thank you so much for that question.
There are definitely organizations across the country. I know that there's a wonderful provincial bereavement lead in your province, actually, as well. They are people who have the specialty and expertise and who are serving people on the ground. I'm from Toronto, and I can tell you that there are organizations such as Bereaved Families of Ontario, and a lot of hospices offer bereavement support.
You're right. There's a patchwork of grief services across the country. This is an under-resourced area that really has affected all of humanity prior to the pandemic. You can imagine that this patchwork of services that has been there pre-pandemic is just bursting at the seams, as I said, because they are hidden. They're things that people don't know about or access until they are affected.
When someone dies in a long-term care home, as so many thousands of people are doing across the country, there is no follow-up bereavement support. When someone dies in a hospital, there is no follow-up bereavement support. I will say, as a proud member of the palliative care community and as a hospice social worker for the past 10 years, that in most palliative care contexts there is no follow-up bereavement support. Hospices are one of the sole places where that happens, for about a year, but any grieving person can tell you that one year is not sufficient in many instances, and with the immense amount of grief and loss happening in your province, that's what we're thinking about when we think about complicated grief.
Complicated grief happens when a person, a community, or a family experiences multiple losses in a short amount of time or a long amount of time. Loss upon loss gets amplified. In many ways, I would never want to project onto your community, but I imagine that there are some manifestations of complex and complicated grief because of these multiple instances of trauma and loss happening around you.
Those are the examples we're speaking of, but, yes, I can look at my list to see who we have. Hospice Halifax would be offering bereavement support, but you're right, it's not like a grief service.