Online Training Program Improves Providers’ Spiritual Competencies in Mental Health Care

Abstract

Background: We designed the online Spiritual Competency Training in Mental Health (SCT-MH) program to train providers across mental health fields in basic religious and spiritual (RS) competencies. The goal was to help address the professional training gap in RS aspects of multicultural diversity and integration. We hypothesized that providers completing the program would demonstrate an increase in attitudes, knowledge, and skills relevant to RS issues in mental health care. Methods: The SCT-MH program, offered online through the edX platform, consists of 8 hours of multi-media content. 169 participants across a broad range of mental health disciplines completed a pre- and post-training survey, which evaluated their spiritual competency using measures assessing their attitudes, knowledge, and skills in the intersection of RS and mental health. We also collected qualitative data to evaluate participants’ levels of satisfaction with the content and format of the program. Results: Participants showed significantly increased spiritual competency in all measures of attitudes, knowledge, and skills following their participation in the course. Participants reported high satisfaction with both the content and the online format of the training program, and a decrease in perceived barriers to integrating RS in practice.Conclusions: These results demonstrate that a brief, novel online training program can help address the current gap between the clinical need and professional requirements for spiritual competency and the general lack of graduate training in this area of multiculturalism. Suggestions for how this program and others like it can be integrated into graduate education and impact clinical care are discussed.

Practice-based evidence for spiritually integrated psychotherapies: Examining trajectories of psychological and spiritual distress.

“…Encouragingly, a growing volume of articles, books, and other training resources are available for clinicians to cultivate these basic competencies. For example, Spiritual Competency Training in Mental Health is an eight-module, online training program with a growing track record of acceptability, feasibility, and effectiveness in promoting basic awareness, knowledge, and skills related to R/S (Pearce et al, 2020(Pearce et al, , 2023Salcone et al, 2023).…”

Teaching Spiritual and Religious Competencies to Psychiatry Residents: A Scoping and Systematic Review

“…75 This lack of coverage seems especially regrettable given that spirituality is featured so centrally in effective treatments such as Alcoholics Anonymous and Twelve-Step Facilitation mutual help groups. 76 To facilitate the delivery of high-quality trainings addressing these topics, we suggest that additional funding be allocated for the development of online training modules (e.g., Pearce and Pargament's online module-based course, Spiritual Competency Training in Mental Health 77 ) and for clinical decision support tools that could serve as standardized training resources for use by medical trainees and educators. 78,79 To our knowledge, this is the first scoping review and first systematic review to examine teaching S&R-related competencies to psychiatry residents.…”