Implementing quality improvement efforts in spiritual care: outcomes from the interprofessional spiritual care education curriculum

The Interprofessional Spiritual Care Curriculum (ISPEC) was created to train interdisciplinary health care teams to recognize and address the spiritual needs of seriously or chronically ill patients. The curriculum, in a train-the-trainer format, employs didactic presentations, discussions, lab sessions, skill demonstrations, and video clips. In course applications, participants were required to submit goals to achieve and demonstrate institutional support. For the first ISPEC course, in July 2018, 48 clinician-chaplain teams attended. Following the 21/2 day course, participants had access to online training modules for 1-year, ISPEC faculty mentoring support, and regular conference calls on goal implementation progress. Participants reported recognizing the importance of providing spiritual care and a new understanding of how collaborating as interprofessional teams enabled them to integrate this care into their home institution settings. In a mixed-methods evaluation survey completed 12 months after the ISPEC course, participants reported on the percentage of their goals completed, number and types of professionals they had educated in spiritual care, and personal confidence regarding spiritual care leadership skills. This data can serve as a model to guide other organizations striving to improve spiritual care, practiced collaboratively by clinicians and chaplains, as an essential aspect of overall QI efforts in palliative care.