Integrating spiritual care into an ambulatory cancer center.

Abstract

205 Background: Spiritual care is identified as a core component of quality oncologic care. Unmet spiritual needs can lead to worse quality of life, lower satisfaction with care, and greater psychological distress. Despite increasing evidence that cancer outpatients also have unmet spiritual needs, professional spiritual care is often limited in the ambulatory setting. Many cancer centers provide access to professional chaplains only while patients are hospitalized. Where chaplain services are available to outpatients, access is often limited. At Mount Sinai, we embedded a full-time professional chaplain in our ambulatory cancer center. This presentation will describe our methods, results, and conclusions from a year of data on outpatient spiritual care referrals. Methods: We identified three sources of referrals to spiritual care: direct referrals from patients’ primary oncology teams, direct referrals from Supportive Oncology/Palliative Care, and automatic referrals through a question about meaning and purpose on our distress screen. We also included the opportunity for patients to self-refer to spiritual care through our distress screen. We collected data on the number of patients identified through these referral sources, time to initial contact, and the validity of the referral as assessed by our chaplain. Results: These three sources resulted in 454 referrals to spiritual care. We screened 1,410 patients through our distress screen and 16% (226) triggered a referral to spiritual care. Distress screen referrals comprised nearly 50% of all spiritual care referrals. In addition, 32% (144) of our referrals came from the patients’ clinical teams and 10% (46) from the Supportive Oncology team. Our chaplain assessed that 31% (141) had a spiritual need that required regular follow-up and 12% (56) required monitoring. Conclusions: Using multiple referral methods we were able to identify a significant number of ambulatory cancer patients with an identified spiritual need. Future projects will look at specific metrics for patient experience, improving chaplain ability to connect with patients, validating our screening question for spiritual distress, and determining an appropriate patient load for an outpatient chaplain.