The impact of spiritual care provided by hospital chaplains: measuring the effects and clarifying the underlying processes

One domain receiving increasing interest, spurred by the aim to deliver whole person care, is the spiritual domain. Hospital chaplains can play a vital role in addressing these needs as key members of interdisciplinary teams. Research shows that patients’ anxiety and negative religious coping significantly diminished after the intervention of the chaplain. However, studies do not give us information about chaplaincy interventions that are carried out in the real life context of hospital wards, in which a broad range of chaplaincy activities are performed with a heterogeneous group of patients suffering from various pathologies and manifesting very diverse needs. Knowledge about the outcomes and processes of chaplaincy can make chaplaincy activities more evidence-based and transparent. This project tackles the lack of knowledge by conducting a mixed method multi-study in a sample of hospital patients. The results of a quantitative prospective study will provide insight in how patients’ emotional states and general and spiritual well-being change after receiving spiritual care by chaplains compared to a control group of patients not receiving spiritual care. A complementary qualitative study (phenomenological approach) will gain insight in which processes are present during chaplaincy interventions. In-depth interviews with patients will focus on the experience of the patients themselves. The third study is a validation study to construct a patient reported outcome measure.