Improving the Spiritual Dimension of Whole Person Care: Reaching National and International Consensus
Publication: Journal of Palliative Medicine
Volume 17, Issue Number 6
Abstract
Two conferences, Creating More Compassionate Systems of Care (November 2012) and On Improving the Spiritual Dimension of Whole Person Care: The Transformational Role of Compassion, Love and Forgiveness in Health Care (January 2013), were convened with the goals of reaching consensus on approaches to the integration of spirituality into health care structures at all levels and development of strategies to create more compassionate systems of care. The conferences built on the work of a 2009 consensus conference, Improving the Quality of Spiritual Care as a Dimension of Palliative Care. Conference organizers in 2012 and 2013 aimed to identify consensus-derived care standards and recommendations for implementing them by building and expanding on the 2009 conference model of interprofessional spiritual care and its recommendations for palliative care. The 2013 conference built on the 2012 conference to produce a set of standards and recommended strategies for integrating spiritual care across the entire health care continuum, not just palliative care. Deliberations were based on evidence that spiritual care is a fundamental component of high-quality compassionate health care and it is most effective when it is recognized and reflected in the attitudes and actions of both patients and health care providers.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Palliative Medicine
Volume 17 • Issue Number 6 • June 2014
Pages: 642 - 656
PubMed: 24842136
Copyright
Copyright 2014, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.
History
Published in print: June 2014
Published online: 29 May 2014
Published ahead of print: 19 May 2014
Accepted: 7 April 2014
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Author Disclosure Statement
No competing financial interests exist.
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