Standardized Spiritual Screening Increases Chaplain Referrals Through the EMR: A Nurse-Chaplain Collaboration for Holistic Acute Healthcare

Abstract

The use of a concise standardized spiritual screening process to identify spiritual practices and needs of patients is essential for holistic nursing care. This interprofessional initiative resulted in the development of a spiritual screening tool that substantially increased Pastoral Services referrals to the patients who needed them and represents a significant opportunity in the delivery of holistic nursing care. Acute care settings may benefit from the adoption of a standardized chaplain referral process housed in the EMR and completed on the frontlines by trusted nursing staff providing patient and family centered care. This standardized spiritual screening process not only triggered essential services of Pastoral Services, but also helped identify and address important spiritual needs of hospitalized patients. The ability to design a tool responsive to the evolving, spiritual needs of patients can be challenging. Through collaboration with chaplains, nurses can be instrumental in creating instruments informed by available evidence in the empirical literature. Furthermore, engaging patients as a source of data during instrument design helps to ensure the content validity and practical usefulness of an instrument. Healthcare organizations might choose to implement and further evaluate/refine the new Spiritual Screening Tool and referral process developed as a result of this initiative.

End-Of-Life Care for Patients With End-Stage Heart Failure, Comparisons of International Guidelines

“…Standardized spiritual screening would increase the chaplain referral process efficiency through EMR and provide more holistic care to EOL patients. 50 The hospital and hospice chaplains not only possess professional knowledge when the healthcare team cannot answer 'unscientific' existential questions, spiritual pain, and suffering but also have an important role when the views on EOL of the patients and physicians do not coincide. 51 In addition, significantly lower rates of hospital deaths and higher rates of hospice admissions were found at hospitals that offered chaplain services than at hospitals that did not.…”