Healing involves much more than just treating a disease. For many patients, spirituality plays an integral role in the journey through illness and healing. Integrating this ideal into whole-person care can be challenging for many doctors in today’s health care system. Helping spearhead this problem is Christina Puchalski, M.D. '94, RESD '97, professor of medicine at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences (SMHS) and director of the GW Institute for Spirituality and Health (GWish).
Established in 2001 as the first university-chartered institute supporting spirituality in health care, GWish hosts an annual Summer Institute to “enable health care professionals to learn practical tools and ways to integrate spirituality more fully into their health care systems.” This year, 30 health care professionals including physicians, chaplains, nurses, counselors, educators, and others gathered for the fourth annual GWish Summer Institute on GW’s Foggy Bottom campus, July 9–13. Several guest speakers addressed meeting patients’ spiritual needs during care, and their remarks spanned specific recommendations for tools and tested models to integrate spirituality as part of whole-person care in inpatient and outpatient, as well as military and other clinical settings.
Tracy Balboni, M.D., M.P.H., assistant professor of radiation oncology at the Harvard Medical School served as the opening keynote speaker. She discussed her innovative research in analyzing the impact of integrating spiritual care. Balboni challenged the participants to examine the cost of patient health and well-being if spiritual distress was not addressed.
What made this year’s institute different from those prior was the clear definition of action as a result of discussion. The first year of the summer institute presented the idea of integrating spirituality into whole person care; now Puchalski and her colleagues are building on national guidelines they developed and inviting nationally-known speakers, such as Balboni, to come talk about their experiences with implementing models of integrated spiritual care.
Three projects from California hospitals were presented throughout the Tuesday morning session, followed by an afternoon discussion and recap of the models. The speakers reviewed their backgrounds in organizing and improving spirituality in palliative care and developing systematic screenings for spiritual suffering. The afternoon found the participants and speakers collaborating on ways to expand the models to other hospitals and practices.
Joan Halifax, Ph.D., abbot of the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, N.M., opened a conversation in compassion during Thursday morning’s session. She shared her heuristic model on compassion, which includes ethical, neuroscientific, and theological factors. A global leader in compassion and palliative care, Halifax also presented a model for clinicians to use in practicing compassion in their work.
For Puchalski, this is just the beginning. “To be able to take it from theory and ethics to actual national models and implementation of those models is a very significant advancement for the field,” she said.
