The Senate released its draft FY2023 appropriations bill last week as well. Included in the Labor-HHS appropriations explanatory statement were two provisions that LeadingAge submitted and advocated for; both related to grief and bereavement care.

One provision encourages the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to develop consensus standards, in consultation with stakeholders, on what constitutes high quality grief and bereavement care. This provision, which can be found on pg. 178 of the explanatory statement, was developed in response to LeadingAge members describing a lack of consistency in the delivery of grief and bereavement services and a desire to be recognized for the high-quality care they deliver.

The other provision, which can be found on pages 214-215, encourages ASPE in collaboration with OASH, CDC, NIH, and the Assistant Secretary for Mental Health and Substance Use to research and develop a report on the scope of need for high quality evidence-based bereavement and grief services best practices for youth and adults. The report should provide a holistic evaluation of populations impacted, such as healthcare workers and communities of color, and the types of necessary interventions to address grief. Additionally, the report should identify the prevalence of different mental health conditions (e.g., PTSD, complicated grief, etc.) that result from the intersection of the pandemic and the behavioral health crisis and identify bereavement and grief services that are currently utilized, the number of individuals accessing services, and their outcomes. This work should examine a potential expansion of the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey (a request also included in the FY2022 explanatory statement) to include a bereavement module urged in last year’s agreement. It should also describe how best practices used in supporting bereavement and grief services in hospice care and other identified interventions could inform work with families who have lost a loved one to COVID–19. This provision was developed in order to work on determining how many people need access to bereavement services as a result of COVID-19 and to gather more data to inform best practices and potential future requests for funding in this space.

The House and Senate appropriations bills are not the same at this point and the Congress needs to agree on parameters for spending bills before FY2023 bills move forward. We will continue to advocate for these provisions to be included in the final package.