University of La Verne
Graduate School of Business
BUS 585 Strategies in Change Management
Individual Research Paper: Elisabeth Kubler-Ross Five Stages of Loss
Xiaohan Liu
Professor John C. Sivie
July 11, 2013

Background Information
In people’s life, it is usually to be seen that some tragedies happens. This may result in horrible experience because people have to cope with such tragedies for a long time. The tragedies may be health-related, family-related, job-related, accident-related, and so on. For example, if someone in your family is diagnosed with a chronic or terminal disease, it may be regarded as a tragedy in your life. It is not only physical accident, but also mental and emotional anguish. According to Torrey (2012), millions of new victims suffer medical mistakes and errors in healthcare every year. Hundreds of thousands die. More and more people feel debilitated for different reasons, and the medical mistakes result in life-changing, which are also tragedies. The effects of how people cope with tragedies may be a combination of physical, mental and emotional. Here is a question: if you are diagnosed with a terminal disease, or if your life quality is destroyed by a medical accident, how can you get past the anguish and grief? And what are you going to do to cope with the accident? Thus, it is necessary to have general guidelines to help you to understand and get through the grieving process, as well as set the stage to help you begin coping.
Introduction
The Five Stages of Grief and Loss were conducted by Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross in 1969 in her book, On Death and Dying (Torrey, 2011). The book explained her classically regarded “five stages of grief”, which were quite innovative at that time. Dr Elisabeth Kübler-Ross is a pioneer in counseling of personal trauma, grief and grieving, associated with death and dying; besides, she improved the