Global Palliative Care: Improving the Quality of Spiritual Care in Global Palliative Care (SA525)

Abstract

•Describe the current status of global palliative care clinical programs which integrate interprofessional spiritual care.•Identify currently available training programs in global palliative care which integrate spiritual care.•Describe challenges in developing spiritual care professionals in different regions of the world. In 2014 the World Health Organization Assembly passed a resolution on palliative care. This resolution advances the efforts to assure that people worldwide have access to quality whole person care in which suffering or total pain is addressed and attended too. The number of people currently requiring palliative care is estimated as over 40 million worldwide and growing given the aging of the population and the increased prevalence of non-communicable disease and complex health conditions. The WHO resolution aims to support palliative care initiatives and calls for the inclusion of spiritual care as a full component of palliative. In order to provide a quality palliative care all clinicians should address spiritual distress and ideally all palliative care teams should include a trained spiritual care professionals and rely on physicians and nurses who have few resources including training in spiritual care. In this concurrent session, global health interdisciplinary leaders will present on educational, clinical care and policy initiatives aimed to promote whole person palliative care including spiritual care. Dr. Betty Ferrell's Elnec program has been taught in 91countries and includes spiritual care. Dr. Kathy Foley and Dr. Christina Puchalski will describe several global initiatives which promote the practice of whole person palliative care with an emphasis on including the spiritual domain of care. Rev. Anke Flohr will describe a clinical pastoral education program with students from Asian countries. Dr. Puchalski will discuss a chaplaincy training program in Mexico and Chile. Dr Katherine Pettus will focus on how spiritual care professional in other countries in Latin America are developing "indigenous models of palliative care that are context specific. Presenters will showcase material from colleagues in other countries.