Spirituality and Patients
COMMENTARY
What Can Chaplains Do in Outpatient Palliative Care?
During three scheduled encounters, chaplains identified the patients’ unmet needs in these three areas and developed plans to meet those needs. In a pre-/post-test design, outcomes were assessed using well-studied tools that measured patient symptoms, spirituality, coping, dignity, depression, and anxiety. From before to after the intervention, increases were seen in several aspects of spiritual well-being, including the subscales for “faith” and “religious coping.”
Viewpoint
Spirituality is a key dimension of quality palliative care, yet palliative care programs need models of care to integrate spiritual care into standard practice. As with all domains of palliative care, there is also a need to generate evidence supporting clinical practice. This study makes an important contribution to the fields of palliative care and spiritual care by testing a model of outpatient spiritual care and including important patient-centered outcomes.
In their discussion, the study authors acknowledge that other variables might have influenced their findings and that some of the tools they used might be measuring psychosocial factors rather than strictly religious or spiritual ones. However, these overlapping constructs are related to purpose, meaning, comfort, and peace-all of which are associated with quality of life, regardless of the patient’s specific faith or belief system.
Chaplains are the spiritual care specialists within interdisciplinary teams, and their contributions, as well as outcomes of their work, have not been well supported or -studied. The Spiritual-AIM intervention has great potential to guide the training of other chaplains and to help achieve a higher level of care for patients and families.
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