Next steps for spiritual assessment in healthcare
- DOI:
- 10.1093/med/9780199571390.003.0042
The past several decades have seen a growing acceptance of spirituality as a dimension of persons that is influenced by and influences their health. There is also growing recognition of the importance of spiritual care that focuses clinical attention on this dimension especially for patients with serious and life-limiting illness, or those with spiritual distress. The purpose of spiritual assessment is to help guide effective spiritual care. Clinicians can select from many models for spiritual assessment that have been published. A critical review of the existing models and further research about spiritual assessment are needed to help us identify and disseminate best practices. Therefore this chapter has three sections: it begins with a review of some existing models for spiritual assessment, then describes the research about spiritual assessment and concludes with a description of issues that will need to be considered in a critical review of models for spiritual assessment.
Access to the complete content on Oxford Medicine Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts for each book and chapter without a subscription.
Please subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.
For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.