Abstract
In the A. Gemelli university hospital in Rome, the presence of highly specialized inter-professional palliative care teams and spiritual assistants who are dedicated to their role in the service of inpatients is valuable to person-centered healthcare. Spiritual needs are commonly experienced by patients with sudden illness, chronic conditions, and life-limiting conditions, and, consequently, spiritual care is an intrinsic and essential component of palliative care. This paper focuses on the sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick to demonstrate the importance of spiritual care as an integral part of palliative care and highlights the need for all interdisciplinary team members to address spiritual issues in order to improve the holistic assistance to the patient. Over a 3-year period (October 2018–September 2021), data about the sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick administered by the hospitaller chaplaincy were collected. A total of 1541 anointings were administered, with an average of 514 anointings per year, excluding reductions related to the COVID-19 pandemic. In 98% of cases, the sacrament was requested by health personnel, and in 96% of cases, the same health personnel participated in the sacrament. These results demonstrate that, at the A. Gemelli polyclinic in Rome, the level of training that the care team has received in collaboration with the chaplains has generated a good generalized awareness of the importance of integrating the spiritual needs of patients and their families into their care, considering salvation as well as health, in a model of dynamic interprofessional integration.
Highlights
The spiritual dimension is an integral aspect of human life that gives meaning to the entirety of a person’s existence, and spiritual needs are commonly experienced by patients with sudden illness, bereavement, chronic conditions, and life-limiting conditions (Best et al 2020)
We highlight how we ordinarily involve other spiritual assistants, if requested, to help all patients fulfill their own needs during their time spent in palliative care, but in this study, we only focused on the specific reference to the Sacraments
While caring for the patients during different stages of their illnesses and while evaluating their therapy in palliative care, the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick was administrated in many cases
Summary
The spiritual dimension is an integral aspect of human life that gives meaning to the entirety of a person’s existence, and spiritual needs are commonly experienced by patients with sudden illness, bereavement, chronic conditions, and life-limiting conditions (Best et al 2020). According to the WHO, palliative care is an approach that improves the quality of life of patients and their families when facing problems that are associated with life-threatening illness through the prevention and relief of suffering by means of the early identification, assessment, and treatment of pain and other physical, psychosocial, and spiritual needs (Sepúlveda et al 2002). Palliative care is the active holistic care of individuals across all ages with serious health-related suffering due to severe illness and especially of those near the end of their lives. It aims to improve the quality of life of patients, their families, and their caregivers (Radbruch et al 2020). Sounders, the founder of modern palliative care, identified multi-dimensional spiritual suffering at the end of life as “total pain”
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