The Grief Navigation Trial: A Comparison of Two Interventions to Support Parents After Their Child's Unexpected or Traumatic Death

Of approximately 60,000 annual deaths of people < 25 years old, ~45% occur unexpectedly or traumatically (e.g., from homicide, suicide, or unintentional injury) and become a medical examiner or coroner (hereafter 'ME') case. Parents and caregivers (hereafter 'parents') of these children suffer debilitating mental health issues like complicated grief and depression, physical problems and family dysfunction, and struggle to find support. Often, the ME is parents' sole point of contact with the healthcare system. Yet MEs have limited education, guidance, and tools to support bereaved parents. Scalable systems-level interventions are needed, at the point of ME care, to connect bereaved parents to critical supports.

This study will compare two interventions to facilitate care across healthcare settings for bereaved parents:

1. CommunityRx-Bereavement (CRx-B), an evidence- and theory-based, low intensity, highly scalable intervention, and

2. General bereavement support information (GBSI), a standardized treatment regimen developed from extant literature and current recommended standards for supporting parents after a child's death.

This is a pragmatic, multi-site 1:1 randomized controlled comparative effectiveness study using a type I hybrid design. CRx-B and GBSI will be carried out by Missing Pieces, a community-based organization. To learn about which strategy works better, the study team will ask parents to complete surveys ~6.5 months after their child dies.