Elevate Your Communication: Breaking Bad News, Humane Decisions, Medical Meaning in Pet Loss, Lessons from Loss
Course Overview
Navigating end-of-life cases is one of the most emotionally challenging aspects of veterinary practice. This on-demand offering brings together four essential sessions to equip veterinary team members with the skills, understanding, and emotional resilience needed to support clients, colleagues, and themselves through these difficult moments. Modules explore aspects of the end-of-life experience, from understanding the complexities behind owners’ decisions and delivering bad news with tender compassion, to processing grief through team case reviews and debriefs, and guiding clients toward healing through meaning-making conversations.
By strengthening communication skills, fostering understanding over judgment, and building emotional literacy around grief and loss, participants will be better prepared to foster trust, compassion, and resilience in their daily work. The knowledge and tools gained from these sessions will help veterinary professionals sustain their own wellbeing while providing stronger, more compassionate support to those they serve.
Each session includes content from top-rated ACVIM Forum programming featuring newly designed interactive and supportive elements, allowing participants to reflect and actively apply new insights in real time. In alignment with the ACVIMs mission, vision, and values, this new offering has been designed with accessibility and affordability in mind, to ensure this content is approachable for veterinary team members at any stage of their career.
Sessions included in this offering are:
- Breaking Bad News: Being Honest and Tender
- Humane Decisions: Decreasing Judgement through Understanding
- Helping Clients Find Medical Meaning in Pet Loss
- Lessons From Loss: A Reflection on the Cases that Change Us
Who Should Attend
- ACVIM Diplomates and Candidates
- European Diplomates and Candidates
- Affiliate Diplomates and Candidates
- Veterinarians
- Veterinary Technicians
- Veterinary Assistants
- Students
- Allied Professionals
Agenda
Breaking Bad News: Being Honest and Tender
Recording Duration: 50 minutes
Interactive Course Duration: Approximately 75-90 minutes
Session Description: Breaking bad news to pet caregivers is something all veterinarians must do but often struggle with. In this session tips on how to start a conversion about a serious illness or euthanasia will be discussed; this includes engaging with the owner(s), gaining trust and rapport, verbal priming, verbal and non-verbal communication, supporting the owner / family, understanding the difference between empathy and sympathy, focusing on the pet’s needs and being non-judgmental. It is also important to understand the caregiver’s budgets which are financial, time, emotional and physical. These conversations are less stressful and more effective when armed with the correct tools. A structured approach with key steps keeps you on track and engages the caregiver in shared decision making. Thinking of these as “serious” or “difficult” conversations can cause anxiety before even stepping in the room and therefore thinking of them as tender discussions is a valuable way to change one’s mindset. Owners may direct their grief and anger at you, and it is important to understand the underlying cause of their emotions and how to redirect the conversation. All team members can benefit from mastering these skills.
Humane Decisions: Decreasing Judgement through Understanding
Recording Duration: 50 minutes
Interactive Course Duration: Approximately 75-90 minutes
Session Description: Pets are 100% dependent on their owners to provide for their physical and behavioral welfare, make informed decisions about their medical care and bear the financial responsibility, take them to appointments and follow up with treatment at home. Considering these responsibilities along with factors related to the pet’s quality of life including the pet’s medical diagnosis and related prognosis, the pet’s physical comfort and behavioral issues generates a “Family Quality of Life” (FQoL). Throughout this lecture, we'll examine the multiple considerations owners have when deciding to either move forward with care for their pet, or decide to humanely euthanize, and ways we can better understand these decisions to help relieve the discomfort and burnout veterinary staff may feel around these decisions.
Helping Clients Find Medical Meaning In Pet Loss
Recording Duration: 50 minutes
Interactive Course Duration: Approximately 75-90 minutes
Session Description: Finding meaning making in grief is integral to hope, healing and emotional growth after the loss of a beloved pet. Research has shown that meaning making in the grief process results in the key difference between positive and negative bereavement outcomes for clients. As clinicians, your clients initially look to you to validate, help them reconstruct, and find medical meaning making around their animal’s death. This presentation will provide you with psychoeducation on the grief process, and help you understand and leverage the key benefits of medical meaning making to improve client rapport and experience. You will be equipped with strategies to move into effective, skillful, and compassionate conversations with your clients.
Lessons From Loss: A Reflection on the Cases that Change Us
Recording Duration: 50 minutes
Interactive Course Duration: Approximately 75-90 minutes
Session Description: Morbidity & mortality case reviews, grand rounds, and debriefing can help veterinary professionals process loss. In this lecture, two cases will be studied taking into account both the medical review and psychosocial well-being of the staff involved.
Cost
| Category | Price |
| Nonmember Diplomates | $125 |
| Primary Care Veterinarians | $125 |
| ACVIM Diplomates | $100 |
| European Affiliate Diplomates | $100 |
| Practice Managers, Admin Staff, Client Care Team Members | $75 |
| ACVIM Candidates | $50 |
| European Affiliate Candidates | $50 |
| Technicians, Veterinary and Technician Students, Veterinary Assistants | $50 |
