SCIE Curriculum
Persons deserve well-trained professionals to be with them just as they are as they seek peace, meaning, and comfort. Respectful, clinical spiritual care honors all persons’ beliefs without judgment or conversion attempts and can make all the difference in a patient and family’s coping, an organization’s morale and reputation, and even the financial bottom line.
Robust psycho-social-spiritual care programs can impact the financial bottom line for agencies through:
- fewer deaths in the ICU
- decreased pursuit of unnecessarily aggressive end of life care
- higher levels of family satisfaction
- greater team morale and staff retention
- stronger community outreach and education programs
- a better overall reputation in the community
- and much, much more!
The Spiritual Care Integrity and Excellence training curriculum includes:
Ethical Existential Care for Non-Theists: Atheists, Agnostics and Humanists
Those who do not follow an organized religion or even a spiritual path may still have questions and/or struggles about existence—how we understand suffering, where we find meaning, what it means to leave a legacy, etc.—that deserve to be supported by the caring professionals around them. This presentation will offer insights into ideologies many may not fully understand and offer ways that we can show up compassionately for them all.
From Clergy to Chaplain: Making the Transition in Ministry
Clergy often come to healthcare with little to no training to assist them in entering the clinical setting. This training explores the similarity and differences in the two fields and assists clergy in making the transition to a new form of ministry. The result will be to ease their minds about the skills they bring with them while making them more competent in the healthcare arena.
Making the Financial Case for Competent Spiritual Care
As a required, but non-reimbursable discipline in healthcare, spiritual care can be one of the first places administrators consider cutting corners in order to make budget. However, there is a strong case to be made that competent spiritual care can substantially impact the financial bottom line of an agency, such that we cannot afford to NOT support a strong spiritual care program. This presentation will make that case.
Rituals & Memorials for Patients, Families, and Teams
Whether religious, spiritual, or cultural, the rituals we use to mark special occasions and ease transitions can be helpful during challenging times. Patients, families, and teams may find comfort and connection with simple, informal ceremonies that can occur spontaneously at the bedside, which can help them process their grief. This presentation will provide do’s, don’ts, and examples for providing this support.
Spiritual Care and the IDT: Strange Creatures in Critical Relationships
Many non-chaplain professionals misunderstand the role of the spiritual care counselor as being similar to that of clergy who lead a faith community. This lack of understanding can lead to under-utilization of SCCs and a weaker spiritual care program. SCCs may also lack understanding of their colleagues’ perspectives and foci of care. Increasing understanding and collaboration between members of the transdisciplinary team can help staff improve coordination of care, maintain appropriate roles and boundaries, and result in improved teamwork and morale. This presentation explores how SCCs can educate their colleagues and become the SCC to whom their colleagues would WANT to refer.
Spiritual Care for Patients with Dementia and Their Families
Lack of understanding leads to great discomfort when working with patients experiencing dementia. Learn practical techniques to find the person who IS still there, find our own centered space of comfort from which to engage them, and tips for caring for their loved ones’ unique grief.
Spiritual Care Interventions: Beyond a Pat and a Prayer
Both new and experienced spiritual care counselors can benefit from this presentation during which methods of spiritual support beyond the usual scriptures and prayers are explored. Learn to expand your repertoire of interventions, be reminded of those you know, but have forgotten to pull out for a while, and share your ideas with others in this rejuvenating presentation.
The Proper Selection, Care, and Feeding of the Healthcare Chaplain
Many administrators and managers have a mistaken view that spiritual care counselors work much like pastors or priests and do not understand the clinical role SCCs can play on a transdisciplinary team. This presentation assists them in understanding the vast benefits of quality SCCs and how to best hire, train, supervise, and support them for the good of the agency, team, and patients and families whom we serve.
Documenting Spiritual Care
The bane of many professionals’ existence, documentation needn’t be a nebulous, angst-filled process. With a list of do’s and don’ts and suggestions for the use of language, this presentation will make a formerly laborious process much less dreaded.
Developing, Implementing, and Evaluating the Spiritual POC
Once strengths and needs have been assessed and goals of care explored, the spiritual plan of care must be developed, not only to satisfy regulatory requirements, but also to guide unified interventions to address patient and family needs by the entire healthcare team. This presentation will walk spiritual care counselors through this process.
The Sweet Spot – Avoiding Spiritual Malpractice for All Professionals
Despite research indicating patients want to talk with their providers about their religious and spiritual concerns, research also shows that they rarely get to do so. Many professionals lack the expertise or time to engage in such conversations, leading to spiritual neglect. Others feel far too comfortable expressing their own faith to patients and families, leading to spiritual abuse. Either extreme is spiritual malpractice. All disciplines can learn to find that Sweet Spot in the middle that neither avoids nor oversteps boundaries in providing respectful, ethical, competent, and clinical spiritual care, and it’s easier than you might think!
Clinical Spiritual Assessment
More than just a check box under religious preference, competent and clinical spiritual assessment seeks to understand a patient’s beliefs, ways of making meaning and finding peace, areas of spiritual distress, and the patient’s own goals for care. This presentation will train spiritual care counselors in the art of exploring and supporting patient spirituality.
Value of the Chaplain in the Healthcare Marketplace
Research increasingly documents the value of effective spiritual care in improving outcome measures and satisfaction scores of patients and families. Spiritual care counselors also have added team value, as they can be amongst the most effective marketers an organization can have on staff. This presentation will explore the multiple ways SCCs can further the mission and reach of any healthcare organization.
Ethical Boundaries in Spiritual Care
Caring for the spiritual, existential, and religious needs of all persons can be a challenge as well as a calling. Models for care that come from faith communities may inform, but cannot govern the provision of care in professional settings in which regulations and professional ethics require us to honor patient rights. This presentation will help spiritual care counselors honor these boundaries in a way that does not deny their own beliefs.
Trauma-Informed Care: Transforming Our Culture and Ourselves
The better we understand the prevalence, potential sources, symptoms, and responses to trauma the better prepared we will be to provide care that decreases the risk of re-traumatization, the care burden on staff, provide greater protection for agencies, and satisfy CMS requirements being implemented for care providers.