Abstract
The Enhancing Quality and Safety: Spiritual Care in Health National Consensus Conference brought together key stakeholders from across Australia to agree a national framework to ensure quality and safety in spiritual care services through a nationally consistent approach to the provision of spiritual care in Australian hospitals. A working group planned the conference that was held over two days. Invitations were distributed to a wide range of stakeholders to ensure a diversity of voices contributed to the outcomes. The conference proceedings included presentations, small group work and facilitated discussion to enable progress on the conference objective. A conference report of the key outcomes was produced and widely distributed. The national consensus conference outcomes described five principles for the design and delivery of spiritual care services for the Australian context. Ten policy statements described key deliverables that could be used to benchmark and measure a nationally consistent approach to spiritual care.
Highlights
The last two decades has seen increased attention given to quality and safety in health care in response to endemic failures in the system to protect patients from harm (Wilson 2005; Hamilton 2000; Hamilton et al 2014, Duckett 2016)
The provision of spiritual care in response to spiritual needs has increasingly appeared in state and government reports in Australia, and while spiritual care is being provided in Australian hospitals, there has been little attention given nationally to how it is provided, who is providing it and how the contribution of this essential element of care is measured
In the end Spiritual Health Victoria is the peak body enabling the provision of quality spiritual care as an integral part of all health services in Victoria (Australia)
Summary
The last two decades has seen increased attention given to quality and safety in health care in response to endemic failures in the system to protect patients from harm (Wilson 2005; Hamilton 2000; Hamilton et al 2014, Duckett 2016). Within this context it is recognised that safety and quality of care require more than attention to the medical and technological aspects of care. While current data reveals Australia to be an increasingly secular society (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2016), research demonstrates that patients want their spiritual needs considered as part of their overall health care (Best et al 2014).
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