From ‘Pastoral Contacts' to ‘Pastoral Interventions'

Abstract

This research collates statistical results of pastoral care contacts undertaken at the Sheffield Northern General Hospital and the Royal Hallamshire Hospital over a twelve month period. The data was found to provide an important overview of chaplaincy work that can be used for future pastoral care management and developing better data collection and quality assurance measurements. The data was subsequently categorised using the World Health Organization (WHO) Pastoral Intervention (PI) Codings to explore the use of a newly developed universal coding system that might allow national and international data collection and comparison. Overall the data from the Sheffield Teaching Hospitals' pastoral data base was found to be easily transferable to the WHO PI codings. This report of the research offers recommendations for recording chaplaincy activity that at present is unrecorded and by doing so might reflect a more accurate picture of the role and demands of chaplaincy services.