Abstract:Improved collaboration between physicians and chaplains has the potential to improve patient experience. To better understand the benefits and challenges of learning together, the authors conducted several focus groups with participants in an interprofessional curriculum that partnered internal medicine residents with chaplain interns in the clinical setting. The authors derived four major qualitative themes from the transcripts: 1. Physician learners became aware of effective communication skills for addressing spirituality. 2. Chaplain interns enhanced the delivery of team-based patient-centered care. 3. Chaplains were seen as a source of emotional support to the medical team. 4. The partnership has three keys to success: adequate introductions for team members, clear expectations for participants, and opportunities for feedback. The themes presented indicate several benefits of pairing physicians and chaplains in the setting of direct patient care and suggest that this is an effective approach to incorporating spirituality in medical training. We thank the reviewer for the suggestion in better presenting our findings. Accordingly, we have removed Table 3 from the manuscript, and have instead added a section with an introduction to each component of Theme 4 and representative quotes. To better organized findings for the readers, we have added bold headings for each theme, and underlined headings for the sub-themes in Theme 4. We have also corrected several small errors in the text, and improved the wording of some of the text.
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Thank you for this very important work. Hopefully, this will model for other MD's how to address spiritual needs of patients. Interestingly, the curriculum was of benefit to the healthcare provider as well. I see lots of benefits for patient outcomes from this work.We appreciate the positive regard of this reviewer, and certainly hope that our work will inspire other innovations in the fields of health care education.In conclusion, we greatly appreciated the opportunity to revise our manuscript. We believe it has been improved by the review process and will make a significant contribution to the fields of medicine and pastoral care. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64