A SPIRITUAL SOCIAL WORK INTERVENTION PROPOSAL IN THE FIELD OF MEDICAL SOCIAL WORK: UMRAN MODEL

Abstract

The social work discipline and occupation have generally aimed at biological, psychological, and social well-being in evaluating people. However, ignoring the spiritual dimension of human beings will cause a deficiency in achieving full well-being. The reason for this is that evaluating humans from a holistic perspective requires taking into account the spiritual dimension as well as the biological, psychological, and social dimensions. The problem of the study is to reveal whether oncology patients have spiritual needs and if they do so, how a spiritual social work intervention proposal can be developed in the field of medical social work. In Turkey, it is important to develop an application model proposal due to the inadequacy of applications for spiritual needs in medical/oncological social work. The study aims to offer a spiritual social work intervention model suitable for Turkish society and values by conducting in-depth interviews with oncology patients and reviewing the relevant international literature. The fact that suggestions were made to meet the needs of oncology patients for spiritual social work in this study reveals its originality. The case study technique, one of the qualitative research methods, was used in the study. In this context, semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with 25 cancer patients. A semi-structured interview form was used in the interviews. According to the findings, it was determined that oncology patients have spiritual needs, no spiritual social work intervention is applied in our country, and spiritual social work interventions are carried out in the world for these needs of patients. At the end of the study, an example of spiritual social work intervention was developed in accordance with Turkey's cultural codes.