Welcome to the Ideal Intervention Project e-Newsletter!

You are among 100 clinical caregivers, educators and friends receiving this first issue because of your commitment to improving the quality of spiritual care and education. Perhaps you are a CPE Supervisor currently requiring the Ideal Intervention Paper (IIP) of your students to help them consolidate learnings gained from presentation of verbatims to their peer group. Perhaps you have heard of this project, the first improvement to the verbatim learning process since its inception in 1936, but wish to learn more before deciding to include the IIP in your curriculum. Perhaps you are a practicing spiritual care clinician wishing to participate in a project designed to collect ideal interventions in a knowledge base that one can access to gain insights from others’ experiences of a pastoral situation similar to the one you are facing. Perhaps you want to help move the discipline of clinical chaplaincy toward a higher degree of professionalism by inductively deriving, testing and validating evidence-based spiritual care best practices. If your answer to any or all of these "perhapses" is yes, then this newsletter is for you.

 

Knowledge Base Now Forming

For three years now CPE students have been forwarding their Ideal Intervention Papers to Fr. Henry G. Heffernan SJ, an NIH chaplain, for further processing and testing in a knowledge base soon to be accessible to clinical spiritual caregivers throughout North America, a giant step toward the validation of evidence-based spiritual care best practices. Contact Henry at hheffernan@gonzaga.orgfor his observations on the first 26 initial drafts of proposed ideal chaplain practices.

 

ACPE Conference and Summit ’09 Workshops

Thirty-five persons participated in the Richmond, Virginia ACPE Conference Workshop entitled "CPE Breakthrough: A New Learning Tool" on October 24, 2008. During a mock verbatim presentation seminar participants imagined themselves to be the student, and then completed a three part Ideal Intervention Form (IIF) comprised of a central issue identifier, a narrative description of the actual intervention, and a narrative description of a hoped-for or ideal intervention. In a real situation those IIFs would have been forwarded to Fr. Heffernan for inclusion in the forming knowledge base.

On February 2, 2009 during Summit '09 the Rev. Yoke Lye Lim Kwong and the editor will co-lead workshop M1.6, "An Outlandish Idea: Evidence-based Spiritual Care Best Practices," to include an overview of the project and another practical exercise, this one designed primarily for clinical spiritual practitioners, not students. Come join us and participate in this informative workshop at DisneyWorld in Orlando. (Rev. Kwong is Director of Spiritual Care & CPE, Howard Regional Hospital, Kokomo Indiana.)

 

Important Reminder

Participating supervisors, please be sure to remind your students to forward their IIPs or IIFs to Fr. Heffernan at hheffernan@gonzaga.org as the current CPE unit draws to a close. Thanks.