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.

Trends and skills for those who offer pastoral care Christian pastoral care has changed a great deal in the past few decades in response to many factors in our rapidly changing world. In part 1 of Nurturing Hope, Lynne Baab discusses seven trends in pastoral care--shifts in who delivers pastoral care, the attitudes and commitments that undergird pastoral care, and societal trends that are shaping pastoral care today. She illustrates them with stories from diverse congregations where Christian caregivers are meeting those challenges in creative and exciting ways. In the second half of the book, Baab presents four practical, doable, energizing skills needed by pastoral carers in our time. Focusing on skills that help carers nurture connections between everyday life and Christian faith, she explores the need for carers to understand common stressors, listen, pray with others, and nurture their personal resilience. Grounded in an understanding of God as the true caregiver and healer, the author offers tips for readers who are training other pastoral carers or developing their own understanding and skills. Each chapter ends with discussion and reflection questions, making the book helpful for groups. Lynne Baab brings readers hope for their caring role and for their own spiritual journey.

David McDonald wrestles with a vital, and for him, a very personal question: is there hope beyond cure?

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-beingThe 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.

How do pastors, chaplains, and caregivers assess the spiritual well-being and needs of the people they minister to? George Fitchett presents a model for spiritual assessment that he and his colleagues developed, illustrated with case studies. He reviews a number of other models and provides a six-part framework for evaluating them. Pastoral caregivers find that the effectiveness of their ministry is enhanced when they are able accurately to identify problem areas and needs in the spiritual lives of the people with whom they work. This book addresses many of the questions pastoral caregivers have raised about this timely topic and provides an informed and balanced approach for making decisions about spiritual assessment models and tools. George Fitchett is associate professor and director of research and spiritual assessment in the Department of Religion, Health, and Human Values at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center, Chicago.

What do spiritual needs, health care, pastoral services, religious resources, statistics, and quantitative research methods have in common? Traditional literature in the pastoral care, counseling, and education movement probably would say, "Not a great deal." Indeed, the pastoral arts and sciences have tended to be high on art (especially praxis) but relatively low on science (especially quantitative research).That's too bad, claims Dr. Larry VandeCreek, who has gathered together a sample of previously published but widely scattered research reports which he hopes will inform hospital chaplains, congregational pastors, hospital personnel, and theological students on ways in which knowledge gained from carefully designed research can enhance their project of care.Selecting only quantitative research reports, the volume explores such topics as the role of spirituality in terminally ill hospitalized patients, the demonstrated helpfulness of prayer in health crisis, the possible impact of hope among women with breast cancer, the role and impact of chaplaincy services in general hospitals, as well as other studies demonstrating a variety of relationships between spirituality and health care.

This book explores the relationship between the practices of pastoral care and the practices of spiritual direction with the aim of enabling pastoral caregivers to draw upon the guiding principles, resources, and techniques of spiritual direction within the Christian tradition. With an emphasis on both "practice" and "presence", the book reclaims the tradition of "soul care" for the pastoral ministry, thereby complementing the medical, or crisis intervention, model of pastoral care with a wellness/growth model of pastoral care.Listening for the Soul: -- Challenges clergy to take seriously the relationship between pastoral care and spiritual direction.-- Integrates theological and psychological insights with issues of spiritual life and formation.-- Includes a chapter on the spiritual formation of children.-- Provides practical guidance for integrating spiritual direction with pastoral care.-- Tends to the pastoral caregivers own needs for spiritual deepening.-- Includesreflection,questions and case studies to enable the text to function on both the individual reader and classroom levels.

Wendy Cadge and Shelly Rambo demonstrate the urgent need, highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic, to position the long history and practice of chaplaincy within the rapidly changing landscape of American religion and spirituality. This book provides a much-needed road map for training and renewing chaplains across a professional continuum that spans major sectors of American society, including hospitals, prisons, universities, the military, and nursing homes. Written by a team of multidisciplinary experts and drawing on ongoing research at the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab at Brandeis University, Chaplaincy and Spiritual Care in the Twenty-First Century identifies three central competencies—individual, organizational, and meaning-making—that all chaplains must have, and it provides the resources for building those skills. Featuring profiles of working chaplains, the book positions intersectional issues of religious diversity, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and other markers of identity as central to the future of chaplaincy as a profession.

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.