Integration of spiritual care services along with supportive care clinic in a comprehensive community cancer center.

Abstract

181 Background: A grave illness like cancer can lead to substantial spiritual distress for patients and their care givers. Not meeting patients’ spiritual needs have been reported to lower ratings of quality and dissatisfaction with care. The FACIT-Sp-12 is used in research studies investigating health related quality of life (HRQOL) outcomes in cancer patients and has special focus on faith, meaning and peace. Methods: We introduced a unique model at the cancer center by having the chaplain resident and pain/palliative care physician evaluating and following patients together during the weekly Supportive Care Clinic. FACIT-Sp-12 score was also calculated for 92 patients on 164 visits during October 2016 till July 2017. Results: Overall, the FACIT-Sp-12 score was calculated for 92 (52 females and 40 males) patients with median age of 69 years (range 36-89). Sixty-eight (74%) were non-Hispanics while native language was English for 71 (77%) patients. The baseline FACIT-sp-12 score ranged between 16 and 48 with median score of 38. Thirty-two patients had follow up visits. 15 of these patients had improvement in their FACIT-Sp-12 score, 12 patients’ score had decreased and 5 patients’ scores were unchanged. There was an increase in FACIT-Sp-12 score in the males but after adjusting for gender, age, race, language and number of follow up visits, none of the variables could predict increase in the FACIT-Sp-12 score. Conclusions: We have successfully implemented this model of integrating spiritual support services to the delivery of cancer care. Decrease in FACIT score may coincide with distress associated with worsening symptoms or change in patient’s condition, and offers an opportunity to address the increased spiritual needs and assistance with coping during times of distress. Future prospective studies will prove instrumental in validating this approach and hopefully become a service reimbursable by health insurances, and thereby become universally accessible.