Champion of Spiritual Care

Chapter 1 highlights how important it is for hospice social workers to operate as champions of spiritual care with and on behalf of their patients. This begins with exploring why it is important to understand a patient’s experience of spirituality. Spirituality is described as having significant implications for life quality and delivery of hospice care Hospice social workers are essential members on interdisciplinary teams charged with the responsibility of ensuring patient access to quality hospice care, which for some patients necessitates spiritual care. To lay the foundation, hospice social workers need to understand how to engage in spiritually-sensitive hospice social work so they have the capacity to coordinate, if not deliver, spiritual care.