Spiritual Care In Common Terms

Encouraging a broad, compassionate, humanistic approach to spirituality, this book shows how patients' spiritual needs can be communicated well within interdisciplinary teams, leading to better patient wellbeing. This book describes the art of charting patients' spiritual perspectives in an open way that will help physicians and nurses to better direct medical care. It includes practical information on how to distil spiritual needs into pragmatic language, helping to demystify spiritual experience. Drawing on his extensive practical experience, the author also suggests key points to emphasise that will enrich chart notes for medical records, including brief, relative narratives, trusting one's own impressions, reflecting holistically on the patient's life, patient attitudes towards treatment and recovery, and describing families' opinions on the health care situation of their loved one. The book shows healthcare professionals of all disciplines how to engage in a shared responsibility for the spiritual care of their patients.

This open access volume is the first academic book on the controversial issue of including spiritual care in integrated electronic medical records (EMR). Based on an international study group comprising researchers from Europe (The Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland), the United States, Canada, and Australia, this edited collection provides an overview of different charting practices and experiences in various countries and healthcare contexts. Encompassing case studies and analyses of theological, ethical, legal, healthcare policy, and practical issues, the volume is a groundbreaking reference for future discussion, research, and strategic planning for inter- or multi-faith healthcare chaplains and other spiritual care providers involved in the new field of documenting spiritual care in EMR. Topics explored among the chapters include: Spiritual Care Charting/Documenting/Recording/Assessment Charting Spiritual Care: Psychiatric and Psychotherapeutic Aspects Palliative Chaplain Spiritual Assessment Progress Notes Charting Spiritual Care: Ethical Perspectives Charting Spiritual Care in Digital Health: Analyses and Perspectives Charting Spiritual Care: The Emerging Role of Chaplaincy Records in Global Health Care is an essential resource for researchers in interprofessional spiritual care and healthcare chaplaincy, healthcare chaplains and other spiritual caregivers (nurses, physicians, psychologists, etc.), practical theologians and health ethicists, and church and denominational representatives.

Providing spiritual care is an important part in administering person-centred holistic care. This textbook explains why it is so important for any allied health professional (AHP) to be involved in, or assist with, the provision of spiritual care for patients and how to do so. Each chapter addresses a specific field of allied health practice, such as speech-language therapy, physiotherapy, occupational therapy and other allied heath areas. The contributors explain how spiritual care can be applied in their specialist area, making it relevant for all AHPs. With contributions from leading academics and practitioners in allied health practice, this book will help AHPs understand how to give patients the complete care that they need, making this text essential reading for AHP practitioners, clinical supervisors, researchers, academics, tertiary lecturers and allied health students.

Structure your ministry to start with patients’needs, hopes, and resources and to be clear what difference your ministry can make! Hospital chaplains value who they are and what they do as contributions to patients’and families’healing and well-being. And they are continually stretching to enhance their ministries. Hospital administrators and other professionals on the care teams, however, often need help to grasp those same values in outcome oriented, observable, documentable, changes-for-the-better terms. The Discipline for Pastoral Care Giving: Foundations for Outcome Oriented Chaplaincy offers a powerful new paradigm for enhancing supportive, effective spiritual care for patients and families as well as communicating substantive outcomes to leaders and clinicians alike. This is all the more important in these times when every possible resource must be well used for the good of our patients and their families. By evaluating the pastoral care you offer, you can become more aware of the discrete skills you exercise in the assessment, planning, intervention, and reflection process. Such evaluation efforts highlight the discrete differences excellent spiritual care makes. This can help you track contributions you are making in terms of the patient's healing and well-being. Having a sound, replicable way to make the process more conscious also helps you communicate your assessment, strategies, and contributions more clearly to other care team members. Furthermore, consistently using The Discipline over time will enable you to discover patterns of spiritual dynamics in how people live with different health care challenges in their lives. These patterns translate into valuable insights as your care for others. The process discussed in The Discipline for Pastoral Care Giving calls on the chaplain to: identify the patient's spiritual needs, hopes, and resources construct a patient profile through identifying the individual's sense of the holy, sense of meaning, sense of hope, and sense of community design the desired outcome(s) you hope your care will contribute--for example, a person who has suffered a spinal cord injury integrates the effects of their injury in their sense of identity and meaning, a person living with cystic fibrosis healthfully grieves the loss of others in the CF community, a patient 'disabled’by the absence of her support community regains use of her personal resources for coping and self-care develop and share a plan for the patient's spiritual care choose interventions (which may range from facilitating a life review, to compassionate confrontation, to reading Scripture, to active listening, to arranging a family care conference) measure outcomes, identifying and communicating the difference your care has made in terms of the patient's healing and well-being The Discipline for Pastoral Care Giving offers case studies, personal experiences, helpful figures and charts, and suggestions for dealing with patients experiencing unique, complex health care challenges, including adults living with cystic fibrosis and violent victims of violence. The wise advice and practical suggestions in this book will help you recognize and document the solid value of your hospital ministry.

'Making Health Care Whole' charts a common language for addressing spiritual care across the disciplines of medicine, nursing, social work, chaplaincy & psychology, offering tools for screening, assessment, care planning & interventions.

This accessible primer sets out the core elements and methods of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE), and shows how to use it most effectively to improve clinicians' capacity for spiritual care. The guide explains how to learn best from verbatim sessions, open agenda groups and writing projects. It shows how the primary learning modalities of CPE add competence to a spiritual caregiver's practice, suggesting helpful ways to reflect on spiritual care encounters from varying perspectives. It recommends ways to collaborate with a peer group, enhance frameworks of understanding people, improve self-awareness and broaden one's scope of caring while also deepening it. Written by an experienced supervisor of the Association for Clinical Pastoral Education, this guide is an essential introduction for anyone seeking to foster positive attitudes and practice of spiritual care in hospitals, hospices and other clinical settings.

These diverse case studies make a compelling case for the importance of effective spiritual care in healthcare and provide unprecedented insight into the essential role of the chaplain within the healthcare team. Presented alongside critical reflections and responses from professionals within chaplaincy, psychology, psychiatry and nursing, they provide an honest and detailed look into how healthcare chaplains actually work with the people in their care and reveal the vital role of narrative and imagination in effective transformative practice. From a 16-year-old with a belief that God would enable a miraculous recovery from paralysis, to an African man with a history of psychosis and depression whose cultural belief in witches complicated his treatment, to a dying Jewish man, aggressive and isolated due to his traumatic life experiences, each case includes insight into the patient's needs and chaplain's perspectives, discussion of spiritual assessments and spiritual care interventions, and accounts of significant encounters and dialogues. The nine paediatric, psychiatric and palliative case studies and reflections in this ground-breaking book will enable chaplains to critically reflect on the spiritual care they provide and communicate their work more effectively, help healthcare professionals develop a clearer understanding of the care chaplains deliver, and provide an informed perspective for those who develop policy around spiritual care and need to make the case for chaplaincy services.

The place of religion in public life continues to be a much-debated topic in Western nations. This book charts the changing role of hospital chaplains and examines through detailed case studies the realities of practice and the political debates which either threaten or sustain the service. This second edition includes a new introduction and updated material throughout to present fresh insights and research about chaplaincy, including in relation to New Atheism and the developing debate about secularism and religion in public life. Swift concludes that chaplains must do more to communicate the value of what they bring to the bedside.