Stakeholder views on the role of spiritual care in Australian hospitals: An exploratory study
Section snippets
Background
The international research exploring the contribution of spiritual care to patient experience, wellbeing and health outcomes continues to grow [[1], [2], [3]]. Correspondingly there has been increased attention given to identifying best practice models for the provision and governance of spiritual care in health care [[4], [5], [6], [7]]. While spiritual care is currently provided in many Australian hospitals, the models and governance guiding this care are varied, as are the capabilities and
Method
The working group established for the Australian national consensus conference developed a self-completion questionnaire comprising both open and closed questions. There were five sections to the questionnaire with 41 questions as outlined below.
Section 1 comprised introductory statements consisting of three general statements reflecting the growing body of research on the contribution of spiritual care to patient wellbeing, health outcomes and patient experience. Section 2 included 10 policy
Results
Data from 477 complete questionnaires were analysed.
Discussion
Wellbeing, health outcomes and patient experience are increasingly framing the discussions on quality of care in health [[16], [24], [25]]. Spiritual care is an essential aspect of these components clearly expressed through the paradigm of patient-centred care [[8], [26]], and this connection should be of interest to policy and decision-makers as they seek to improve the quality of patient care. Just how spiritual care positively affects these components is yet to be fully explored although
Conclusion
The stakeholders who participated in this study have positive views towards the role of spiritual care in hospitals. High levels of agreement with policy issue statements and policy objectives and the identified themes from free text responses all begin to identify the issues that need to be addressed to form a national policy agenda for the provision of professional spiritual care in Australian hospitals. These directions informed the June 2017 National Consensus Conference and may provide
Conflicts of interest
None.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Dr Bruce Rumbold and Dr Sandra Leggat for their supervision and feedback on this article.
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- 1
The research for this publication was undertaken while completing a PhD at La Trobe University, 215 Franklin Street, Melbourne, 3000, Victoria, Australia.
- 2
Chief Executive Officer at Spiritual Health Victoria, 3/25 Gipps St, Collingwood, 3067, Victoria, Australia.