Spiritual care: a new approach to supporting people with MND and their families

<h3></h3> Neuropsychiatric and psychological disorders are relatively common in people with MND (pMND) and their families. In palliative care, it is recognised that patients faced with an incurable illness may seek answers or comfort from other methodologies, including Spiritual Care. Using the existing CARE-MND platform, pMND and their families were offered the opportunity to meet with a specialist in spiritual care, embedded within the multidisciplinary care team. We studied the outcome of this intervention using established spiritual care assessment tools (PROM) and structured interviews. Although the study was limited by the relatively small and select sample size, it suggests the intervention was useful in this cohort based on outcome with structured interviews rather than PROM. Reasons for this difference in outcome reflect the unique issues in MND that are not adequately addressed via PROM. We suggest that further studies are undertaken in larger populations to confirm these findings and if our results are replicated in these studies, we recommend that spiritual care specialists are integrated into existing clinical care teams to provide support for pMND and their families.