Improving the Spiritual Dimension of Whole Person Care: Reaching National and International Consensus

TLDR

Spiritual care is a core element of compassionate health care, building on prior 2009 and 2012 consensus efforts that sought to embed it into palliative and broader health care settings. The purpose of the 2012 and 2013 conferences was to reach consensus on integrating spirituality into health care structures at all levels and to develop strategies for creating more compassionate systems of care. Organizers employed a consensus‑building process that expanded the 2009 interprofessional spiritual care model, producing 2013 standards and recommended strategies for integrating spiritual care across the entire health care continuum.

Abstract

Two conferences, Creating More Compassionate Systems of Care (November 2012) and On Improving the Spiritual Dimension of Whole Person Care: The Transformational Role of Compassion, Love and Forgiveness in Health Care (January 2013), were convened with the goals of reaching consensus on approaches to the integration of spirituality into health care structures at all levels and development of strategies to create more compassionate systems of care. The conferences built on the work of a 2009 consensus conference, Improving the Quality of Spiritual Care as a Dimension of Palliative Care. Conference organizers in 2012 and 2013 aimed to identify consensus-derived care standards and recommendations for implementing them by building and expanding on the 2009 conference model of interprofessional spiritual care and its recommendations for palliative care. The 2013 conference built on the 2012 conference to produce a set of standards and recommended strategies for integrating spiritual care across the entire health care continuum, not just palliative care. Deliberations were based on evidence that spiritual care is a fundamental component of high-quality compassionate health care and it is most effective when it is recognized and reflected in the attitudes and actions of both patients and health care providers.