Abstract
This study examines the religious/spiritual referral patterns in hospice and palliative care. Religion and death are two highly intersected topics and albeit often discussed together in hospice and palliative care, little is known about how professionals respond to religious/spiritual needs of patients/families/friends and in relation to the chaplaincy team. By means of an in-depth interviewing method, this paper reports on data from 15 hospice and palliative care professionals. Participants were recruited from across five hospice and palliative care organisations, and the data was managed and analysed with the use of NVivo. Largely, participants were keen to refer patients/families/friends to the chaplaincy team, unless the former’s faith or lack thereof did not match the chaplains, in which case referrals to a religious leader in the community were favoured. This shed light to the tendencies to homogenise religious/spiritual beliefs. The paper concludes with some implications for practice and research.
Highlights
Near the end of life, many take comfort in their spirituality and religion to make sense of the impending death
This study examined one practical aspect of religious/spiritual care in hospices
This paper presents two routes to religious/spiritual referrals when responding to religious/spiritual needs of patients, their family members and/or friends: referrals to the chaplaincy or religious leaders in the community, when the former is unavailable or lacking offer
Summary
Near the end of life, many take comfort in their spirituality and religion to make sense of the impending death. Drawing on the idea of afterlife which Lifton and Lifton and Olson (1974) define as religious symbolic immortality, death is understood to be uncertain and disruptive and religion becomes an anchor point to prepare oneself for the end and deal with the disorganization that the impending death brings into one’s life. It is these premises that influenced much of the work preceding and building up to the hospice movement; religion underpinned its very foundations (Clark 2000)
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