What Motivates Healthcare Professionals' Referrals to Chaplains, and How to Help Them Formulate Referrals that Accurately Reflect Patients' Spiritual Needs?

As many hospitals lack standardized referral protocols for spiritual care, healthcare professionals' perceptions and preferences play an important role in their decisions to refer patients to chaplains. To better understand what motivates these professionals to refer patients and how they approach spiritual care, this article examines referral requests from twelve healthcare professionals to a chaplain at the Lausanne University Hospital Department of Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine. Comparative discourse analysis highlights that requests are largely driven by difficulties in patient-professional relationships.