PILOTING A QUESTIONNAIRE TO EVALUATE SPIRITUAL HEALTH CARE (ESC) IN THE IBEROAMERICAN REGION

Abstract

The relationship between Spirituality and Health is increasingly relevant in academic fields and in medical practice, given the growing evidence and the search to improve the comprehensive approach to people's health. In this sense, the ICPM Working Group on Spirituality and Health considered identifying the practice and knowledge of CES in residents and family doctors in our region. OBJECTIVE: Evaluate the formation, knowledge, interest and practice of Spiritual Health Care (CES) in residents and Family Physicians of Latin America. METHODS: Cross-sectional study. Our universe was the postgraduate residents of Family Medicine and family doctors in Latin America. Sampling is not probabilistic for convenience. A pilot was carried out applying a structured survey. RESULTS There were 532 participants from 17 Latin American countries. 62.5% denied having received training in spiritual health care. 15% said they received some training in this regard. 19.39% address spirituality if the patient requests it, while 19.83% do not know any way to do it. 29.3% expressed the use of complementary spiritual therapies as part of the holistic approach that characterizes the practice of Family Medicine. 82.67% of respondents do not know any spiritual assessment instrument. 94% reported interest in receiving information about spirituality. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS In this study it was found that 85% of doctors specializing in Family Medicine did not have training in spiritual matters during their residency, 17% know instruments of spiritual assessment in the clinical context, however, as Balboni et al. Found, Health service providers do not believe they are capable of making this approach in our study, 63% denied having received training in spiritual health care. Our study has important limitations. First, it is based on the data collected in 2018, after an invitation, to family doctors or health personnel who chose to collaborate with the research. As such, it serves as the basis for future evaluations. Secondly, the data is based on surveys conducted online, and we believe that respondents participated voluntarily, and neutrally. Thirdly, as with all the cross-sections of the data, the results do not establish a causal relationship between the need for training in Spiritual Care and Health and what the patient perceives. Future experimental or longitudinal studies are necessary to better describe such relationships. Despite these limitations, this study suggests that in 2018, most of the doctors in Latin America do not receive training in CES, and also perceive the need to receive it to improve the comprehensive evaluation of their patients. The doctors who asked about the spiritual concerns of the patients in specific clinical settings managed to approach the issue intuitively, because they do not know the assessment scales to do this approach. This study also demonstrates that there is a need for training to address CES issues at both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. It was interesting to verify that at the Ibero-American level the patient is the one who requests and promotes medical care that includes CES and the health staff provides it because he knows that this is important in the health-disease process. It is a priority for the health team, especially for family medicine to maintain the holistic evaluation of the patient with a comprehensive and integrative vision, which includes formal training in spirituality and health issues, some family doctors practice spiritual and health care intuitively, and have high interest in getting more information on this topic. These data suggest that health care providers, especially family doctors in Latin America, want to address their patients in a comprehensive manner, to improve patient satisfaction by worrying about meeting this unmet need of the patient.