Time to Develop Guidelines for Spiritual Care in Serious Illness

Abstract

In 2022, a JAMA systematic review of 342 high quality studies called for spiritual care to be a routine part of care for patients with serious illness. The review's multidisciplinary panel made several recommendations for addressing patients' and families' spiritual concerns. Despite these evidence-based recommendations, there are no clinical guidelines that inform when and how such spiritual care should be provided. We propose convening a multi-disciplinary workgroup to generate specific and actionable guidelines for incorporating spiritual care in serious illness care. We suggest three workgroup priorities: (1) determining best approaches to identifying patient and family members' spiritual care needs; (2) developing ways to integrate chaplains into routine clinical care; and (3) determining best approaches to communicate availability of spiritual care. Developing these guidelines is an imperative next step to deliver high quality, person and family-centered care.