Spiritually Competent Practice in Health Care

This book will be of tremendous use to all healthcare professionals from physicians to nurses to social workers, rehabilitation therapists, and chaplains. The pathway taken here is a sensible and reasonable one, emphasizing a patient-centred approach that underscores the importance of spiritually competent care. The Editors do an excellent job of describing how to integrate spirituality into patient care for all of the different healthcare professionals. They also emphasize the importance of an evidence-based approach that is guided by research. This book provides superb guidelines that will be enormously helpful to every healthcare professional.

Harold G Koenig, M.D., Professor of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina

This practical guide tackles the important issues of spirituality in health care, emphasising the role of organisations in developing a culture of leadership and management that facilitates spiritual care. Spirituality is a central part of holistic care that addresses physical, mental, emotional and spiritual aspects of care in an integrated way.

The chapters are written by experts in their fields, pitched at the practitioner level rather than addressing ‘spirituality’ as a purely theoretical concept. Each one describes the realities of spiritually competent practice and show how it can be taught and put into practice in a variety of areas and settings, including

Undergraduate and Postgraduate education

Acute healthcare settings

Mental health

Primary care

End of Life Care

Creative organisations

Social services

Ideal for practitioners, educators, trainees and managers in nursing and healthcare, the book is also relevant reading for occupational therapists, physiotherapists, social workers and psychologists.