The Catalogue of Spiritual Care Instruments: A Scoping Review

Abstract

Spiritual care has been a growing focus in international healthcare research over the last decades. The approaches to spiritual care are many and derive from many different medical fields and different cultural contexts and often remain unknown across healthcare areas. This points to a potential knowledge gap between existing instruments and the knowledge and use of them cross-disciplinarily and cross-culturally, and thus best practice insights are not sufficiently shared. This article contributes to the growing field of spiritual care by providing an overview of the various approaches (henceforth instruments) to assess patients’ spiritual needs in view of improving spiritual care. This was done through a scoping review method. The results of the review were collected and catalogued and presented here as ‘The Catalogue of Spiritual Care Instruments’. The included instruments derive from a wide range of geographical contexts and healthcare areas and are aimed at patients and healthcare professionals alike, clearly showing that spiritual care is a focus in healthcare internationally. However, it also shows the difficulties of defining spiritual care, the importance of local contexts, and the difficulties of cross-cultural validity. The catalogue contains 182 entries and is available as an interactive platform for the further development of spiritual care internationally.

The Spiritual Needs Questionnaire in Research and Clinical Application: a Summary of Findings

“…A benefit of the SpNQ is that it is not restricted to end-of-life issues, but also relevant for more early and less severe stages of disease, and applicable in adolescents and in healthy persons in difficult life situations (Büssing et al, 2021a(Büssing et al, , 2021bBüssing, 2021d. The SpNQ instrument is available in different translations and is used as a research tool in international studies [overview in Büssing (2021c)], and was highlighted as a relevant spiritual needs assessment in literature/scoping reviews (Seddig et al, 2016;Nissen et al, 2020).…”

The Process of Spiritual Care

“…In the following we will outline the process of spiritual care and then commence to a discussion of the process, exemplified by instruments/interventions focused on the different phases. The examples in the discussion have been drawn from the Catalogue of Spiritual Care Instruments ( Damberg Nissen et al, 2020 ).…”

“…Providing spiritual care in a global, culturally entwined, and pluralistic world (Taylor, 2007;Berger, 2014) is complicated, as providers have to be sensitive to the potential variance in the secular, spiritual, and religious meaning orientations of their patients (Ghorbani et al, 2021). A wide range of interventions have been developed in the area of spiritual care, but research shows that these interventions are often developed as stand-alone instruments, such as for instance questionnaires or interview guides assessing spiritual needs (Damberg Nissen et al, 2020), and do not approach spiritual care as an ongoing and integrated part of patientcare. One of the reasons for this is that spiritual needs are always individual, and how spiritual care is provided depends on these specific needs, but also on the relationship between patient and provider(s) (Moudatsou et al, 2020).…”

“…Positing spiritual care as a process brings to attention that spiritual care instruments and interventions are often focused on specific aspects of spiritual care, but also that combining existing instruments in a spiritual care treatment plan is possible and can be a beneficial approach to providing spiritual care ( Damberg Nissen et al, 2020 ; Nissen and Hvidt, 2021 ). It also brings to attention that work is needed in the area of developing and training for providing spiritual care.…”

“…Hereafter, we outline and discuss the process of spiritual care, exemplified by instruments working in the different phases of the process. The examples in the discussion are drawn from the Catalogue of Spiritual Care Instruments ( Damberg Nissen et al, 2020 ).…”