Advancing Spiritual Care (ASC) is a ten-year initiative designed to transform patient care, elevating spiritual care as an essential element of whole person care across health systems worldwide. Research has shown that spiritual care has a significant impact on patient health and wellbeing. Guidelines have been developed on how to integrate spiritual care in clinical settings. Through ASC, we envision an innovative model of global health, where all members of the interprofessional healthcare team recognize and address spiritual health as a fundamental part of treating the whole person–physical, emotional, and spiritual. All clinicians will assess, diagnose, and treat spiritual distress, working collaboratively with specialist care professionals to address patient suffering. We foresee spiritual care will become a standard of care across all clinical settings and that spiritual health, especially spiritual distress, will be attended to in the same way as other clinical problems.
In this second cycle of ASC, we will continue to train clinician-chaplain pairs using GWish’s Interprofessional Spiritual Care Education Curriculum (ISPEC) Train-the-Trainer course, as well as offer an introductory micro-learning series and an annual ISPEC 101 to teach clinicians basic skills to integrate spiritual care into their practice; further, we will develop targeted ISPEC curricula for different specializations. We will recruit and mentor ten interprofessional GWish Scholar teams to design and implement Demonstration Projects, creating testable models of clinical spiritual care and building an evidence base to demonstrate the impact of spiritual care on patient outcomes and well-being. ASC is an innovative project designed to develop the next generation of clinical spiritual care leaders and promote the reintegration of spirituality into the medical culture, where patients feel heard about what matters most to them and where clinicians practice from their vocation and call.
