Betty Ferrell

This comprehensive, evidence-informed text provides clinicians, researchers, policy-makers and academicians, with content to inform and enrich the guidelines recommended by the National Consensus Project and the National Quality Forum Preferred Practices. It is designed to meet the needs of health social work professionals who seek to provide culturally sensitive biopsychosocial-spiritual care for patients and families living with life-threatening illness. Edited by two of the leading social work clinician-researchers in the US, this text serves as the definitive resource for practicing clinicians and fulfills the need for social work faculty who wish to complement general health care texts with information specific to palliative and end-of-life care.

In the last fifteen years, the field of palliative care has experienced a surge in interest in spirituality as an important aspect of caring for seriously ill and dying patients. While spirituality has been generally recognized as an essential dimension of palliative care, uniformity of spiritual care practice has been lacking across health care settings due to factors like varying understandings and definitions of spirituality, lack of resources and practical tools, and limited professional education and training in spiritual care. In order to address these shortcomings, more than forty spiritual and palliative care experts gathered for a national conference to discuss guidelines for incorporating spirituality into palliative care. Their consensus findings form the basis of Making Health Care Whole. This important new resource provides much-needed definitions and charts a common language for addressing spiritual care across the disciplines of medicine, nursing, social work, chaplaincy, psychology, and other groups. It presents models of spiritual care that are broad and inclusive, and provides tools for screening, assessment, care planning, and interventions. This book also advocates a team approach to spiritual care, and specifies the roles of each professional on the team. Serving as both a scholarly review of the field as well as a practical resource with specific recommendations to improve spiritual care in clinical practice, Making Health Care Whole will benefit hospices and palliative care programs in hospitals, home care services, and long-term care services. It will also be a valuable addition to the curriculum at seminaries, schools of theology, and medical and nursing schools.

This is one of the few texts available that focuses on the human aspec t of managing pain and suffering. Through personal accounts and profes sional studies, this collection of essays examines the impact of pain and suffering from the viewpoints of patients, family members, clergy and caregivers. The book promotes a holistic understanding of human su ffering that extends beyond the scope of pain management to stress the overall importance of a fully developed patient-provider relationship . The contributors emphasize the necessity of human engagement, which is often considered as falling outside the bounds of medical treatment, as crucial to a patient's experience.