Welcome
We are pleased to invite you to the third European Grief Conference (EGC), taking place in Porto, Portugal, September 9th to 11th, 2026. The conference is hosted by SPTFE, Universidade de Maia, in partnership with the Bereavement Network Europe (BNE), the Danish National Center for Grief and the Irish Hospice Foundation (IHF)
The chosen venue is the SuperBock Arena Congress Center https://www.superbockarena.pt/organizar/congressos-e-eventos-corporativos/
The vision of EGC is to bring together researchers, practitioners, and educators to learn, share and feel inspired to collaborate around the development and implementation of effective and culturally sensitive bereavement care responses across Europe. The conference will be structured around a four-tiered needs-based bereavement care model (see below), inspired by the evidence-based public health model as advanced by NICE (UK), Samar M Aoun, and others.
Consequently, we hope to appeal to a broad audience, consisting of researchers, practitioners, and educators from various disciplines and practice sectors.
The conference will have four overarching themes:
Level 0: Society: Grief Literacy, Advocacy & Community (societal grief literacy & awareness). Here public education about grief empowers individuals, communities, and decision-makers to increase the public’s understanding of bereavement and support needs of bereaved persons.
Level 1: Normal Grief: General Awareness & Support (general support & Information). Here the focus is on having access to information and adequate support, for example, available from family, social, and care networks.
Level 2: Bereavement Support: Prevention & Risk Factors (extra support). A range of identifiable risk factors contribute to the fact that some bereaved people need additional organized support, for example in the form of peer-led groups, psycho-education in community settings.
Level 3: Complicated grief reactions: Diagnosis & Treatment (therapy support). Smaller proportions of bereaved people with additional stressors and disruptions to their grief will require specialist therapeutic responses.
EGC welcomes a broad range of abstracts on bereavement and grief-related topics with a focus on research, education/policy or practice.