Suchergebnisse

Hospital chaplaincy seeks to support the spiritual well-being of all those in hospital - whatever their worldviews of belief systems and however these are expressed. This study sought to explore of the current model of chaplaincy in addressing the spiritual needs of non-religious patients by developing a tool, called The Conversational Content Tool (CCT), which sought to understand those encounters in both a qualitative and quantitative manner. All weekday chaplain-patient encounters across all wards in Addenbrookes Hospital, Cambridge,1 2 were categorized according to assessment of the patient's belief system - whether religious, non-religious or not known. After every encounter where the patient's belief system was identified as non-religious or not known, the chaplain completed a simple spread sheet (CCT) in order to describe the content and simple outcome measures of the encounter. Over 6 weeks, 1042 encounters were studied and categorized. The conversational content of 237 of the "non-religious/belief unstated" encounters was captured using the conversational content tool (CCT), yielding evidence of considerable identification of spiritual distress symptoms. The new research tool used for recording of encounters allowed expression of results in numerical and graphical form providing the potential for further development of work on chaplain-patient encounter.

A mixed quantitative/qualitative study using two questionnaires was undertaken, to explore nurses' attitudes to and their perceptions of the concepts of spirituality and spiritual care and to determine whether they believed they could meet patients' needs in this field. Following ethical approval, the questionnaires were distributed to 68 nurses on the Haematology, Oncology and Elderly Care wards. Analyses included descriptive statistics and Cronbach's alpha, and content analysis of open text. A response rate of 52.9% was obtained. Nurses indicated a broad understanding of spirituality, not only one related to religious beliefs and practices. The majority (89.9%) believed that patients should receive spiritual support as part of their holistic care, and 55.6% reported that they could o er this. Content analysis identified key themes relating to spiritual care and to spirituality. A need for further training in spiritual care was recorded by 58.3% of respondents. Further studies concentrating on nurses treating patients with a poor prognosis would be helpful.

An inpatient stay in an acute hospital setting often causes distress, confusion and in many cases the desire to explore existential issues. For health care chaplains there is no debate about the efficacy of the role they play in these existential explorations however there is an increasing need to provide evidence-based research to verify this. As a profession chaplaincy is well versed in anecdote but it needs to move beyond that to evidence of a more robust kind. This research project was an in-depth review of the dialogues held with thirty-four different adults in an acute hospital over a period of three months in 2007 to determine what people talk to chaplains about. The project involved 12 different chaplains having an encounter with a patient and then writing it up as a verbatim. At the same time a literature search was carried out to determine any other research projects of a similar nature. The texts of the encounters were analysed by two chaplains independently – they determined themes raised in the discussions and manually scored these according to the frequency of their occurrence. Results were then compared and areas of discrepancy discussed. Qualitative software was used to verify the findings. The results showed that con-versations appeared to fit into four main topics: spiritual themes; life stories; hospital experiences and emotional expression.