Assessing the Spiritual Needs of Long-Term Paediatric Patients and Identifying Chaplaincy Interventions Which Address Those Needs

In order to offer holistic, patient-centred care, attention needs to be paid to spiritual needs. For long-term paediatric patients, this need can be crucial as they may be facing a range of challenges, including life-limiting or life-changing illnesses. This article is based on two pieces of case study research. The first developed a phenomenological definition of spirituality drawing on both the literature and thirty-six case studies of oncology patients where interpretive spiritual encounters (ISEs) were used to identify spiritual needs. The spiritual needs identified were meaning-making, transcendence, connectedness, security, hope, and significance. A challenge for chaplains is then to identify interventions which can respond to the spiritual needs assessed; examples are offered demonstrating this. The second piece of case study research draws on existing taxonomy research in which thirteen paediatric case studies were analysed for practice-based methods of responding to spiritual needs. This offers the possibility of a common language to describe the chaplain’s response to identified spiritual needs, which informs the interventions chosen.