Background
Spirituality is a patient need that requires special attention from the Pain and Palliative Care Service (PPCS) team. This QI project aimed to provide spiritual assessment for all new outpatients with serious life-altering illnesses.
Measures
Percentage of new outpatients receiving spiritual assessment (Faith, Importance/Influence, Community, Address/Action in care [FICA], psychosocial evaluation, chaplain consults) at baseline and post-interventions.
Intervention
Interventions included encouraging clinicians to incorporate adequate spiritual assessment into patient care and implementing chaplain co-visits for all initial outpatient visits.
Outcomes
The quality improvement interventions increased spiritual assessment (baseline vs. post-interventions): chaplain co-visits (25.5% vs. 50%), FICA completion (49% vs. 72%) and psychosocial evaluation (89% vs. 94%).
Conclusions/Lessons Learned
Improved spiritual assessment in an outpatient palliative care clinic setting can occur with a multidisciplinary approach. This project also identifies data collection and documentation processes that can be targeted for improvement.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.