The Catalogue of Spiritual Care Instruments: A Scoping Review

Abstract

Spiritual care has been a growing focus in international healthcare research over the last decades. The approaches to spiritual care are many and derive from many different medical fields and different cultural contexts and often remain unknown across healthcare areas. This points to a potential knowledge gap between existing instruments and the knowledge and use of them cross-disciplinarily and cross-culturally, and thus best practice insights are not sufficiently shared. This article contributes to the growing field of spiritual care by providing an overview of the various approaches (henceforth instruments) to assess patients’ spiritual needs in view of improving spiritual care. This was done through a scoping review method. The results of the review were collected and catalogued and presented here as ‘The Catalogue of Spiritual Care Instruments’. The included instruments derive from a wide range of geographical contexts and healthcare areas and are aimed at patients and healthcare professionals alike, clearly showing that spiritual care is a focus in healthcare internationally. However, it also shows the difficulties of defining spiritual care, the importance of local contexts, and the difficulties of cross-cultural validity. The catalogue contains 182 entries and is available as an interactive platform for the further development of spiritual care internationally.

Keywords

• spiritual care
• spirituality
• religion
• existential
• spiritual needs
• scoping review