Measuring the impact of a pastoral care intervention to increase referrals and improve the quality of chaplain documentation in patient records.

The complexity of patient care demands that health care teams collaborate effectively. This means that when pastoral care staff engage with patients, they need to communicate their findings to other members of the multidisciplinary team to maximize patient benefits. In 2016, an Australian hospital found that pastoral care staff were able to visit only 30% of admitted patients, and that documentation of pastoral care visits was minimal.

Evaluation of the Interprofessional Spiritual Care Education Curriculum in Australia: Online.

Objective: Spiritual care is a component of quality palliative care, but healthcare providers have reported lack of training as a barrier to its provision. This paper describes the evaluation of the Interprofessional Spiritual Care Educational Curriculum (ISPEC) which is a six-module evidence-based curriculum developed for teaching interprofessional spiritual care based on a generalist-specialist model of spiritual care.

Method: The course was run online in 2020 and attended by 20 healthcare workers who were invited to join the evaluation.