Spiritual Caregiving for Older Adults: A Perspective from Clinical Practice

SUMMARY

Spiritual care has been described as being holistic and cutting across professional disciplines. By taking a transdisciplinary approach, all health and social service providers have the potential for providing spiritual comfort to their patients, clients, and consumers. Spiritual assessment allows the clinician to obtain a deeper knowledge of the individual's strengths, weaknesses and coping style. Implementing a spiritual intervention imbues clinical practice with a sense of vitality, creativity, movement, and reaching out to make significant connections with others. Thus, one of the main charges of spiritual caregiving is to be available and present when patients and clients face the unknown and unknowable. As clinicians begin to speak to the multitude of biopsychosocial and cultural factors relevant to the spiritual well-being of older adults there must be clinical guidelines. However, given the relatively recent attention to spiritual intervention, such guidelines are lacking and should be developed in the near future. However, clinicians may become catalysts in helping individuals to achieve a measure of calming fulfillment and spiritual well-being as they face the challenges of later life.

KEYWORDS:

• Clinical practice
• transdisciplinary
• spiritual well-being
• spiritual caregiving