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Abstract

The term spiritual care is used both as an overarching concept to include all aspects of attending to ‘the spiritual’ in healthcare and to specify those interventions that may follow the assessment of spiritual need. However, the boundary between spiritual assessment and spiritual care intervention, between identifying and responding to spiritual need, is very fluid. As Holloway et al. (2011) note in their systematic review of literature dealing with spiritual care at the end of life, ‘even the simple act of acknowledging spiritual needs and the broader spiritual dimension is to respond to that need … many of the interventions identified include assessment as an integral part of the intervention’ (p. 27). Nonetheless, they define ‘spiritual interventions’ (a term imported from US social work literature) as ‘those aspects of spiritual care which … seek to go beyond the assessment of spiritual need by responding to the spiritual issues raised and seeking to meet that need’ (p. 27).