Abstract
Spiritual care is an essential aspect of whole-person health care. Spiritual health is the domain of total health of a person which impacts the total well-being of the person. People who experience serious spiritual distress tend to have poorer quality of life, and greater depression and anxiety. It is therefore important that all clinicians address patients’ spiritual health as part of their clinical assessments. Many national and international guidelines have been developed for addressing spiritual care as a part of whole-person care, especially in the field of palliative care. These guidelines focus on the clinical aspect of spirituality, identifying spiritual distress as a clinical symptom to be assessed and treated. This model of interprofessional care developed following these guidelines is based on a generalist-specialist model of care: providers address spiritual concerns and work with spiritual care specialists in treating spiritual distress and helping enhance spiritual well-being. The anamnestic spiritual history tool FICA© can be used by clinicians to assess spiritual distress and spiritual resources of strength. Spiritual care has an intrinsic aspect, which includes presence in a patient’s suffering and creating a space for the patient to find their own healing, and an extrinsic aspect, which involves doing a formal assessment. Limitations to integrating interprofessional spiritual care include lack of training. Initiatives such as the ISPEC curriculum have been developed to train clinicians in interprofessional spiritual care.
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Puchalski, C. (2021). Spiritual Care in Health Care: Guideline, Models, Spiritual Assessment and the Use of the©FICA Spiritual History Tool. In: Büssing, A. (eds) Spiritual Needs in Research and Practice. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70139-0_3
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