Help! Your Opinion Is Needed!

You are a person with expertise and a vital interest in Spiritual Care. So please save the attached informal opinion survey "Spiritual Care as an Authentic Profession" to a Word file and then respond to its 20 items. You will assess Spiritual Care in comparison with characteristics of a profession. Results will become the basis for a strategy toward performance improvement that will both help patients/clients and assure the continuing presence of Spiritual Care on the multidisciplinary team.

Have Workshops/Seminars, Will Travel

Still hazy on what the Ideal Intervention Project really has to do with your work and with your future? Our material and our message are most effectively communicated in person. For this reason we offer conference workshops and didactic seminars as schedules and distances permit. (The project is as yet unfunded, so any help with expenses is much appreciated.) To date Spiritual Care practitioners, educators, counselors and students have engaged with us at such events in Stony Point NY, Cuyahoga Falls OH, Durham NC, Washington DC, Richmond VA, Orlando FL, and Virginia Beach VA. Contact the Editor at mariejohn50@att.net for details.

More Q & As

An ACPE Supervisor who had stopped requiring the Ideal Intervention Paper of students was asked why. He said, "We are already doing this." In fact he was, by asking students to complete a form "Group Feedback/Reflection" after verbatim presentations to peers. Since results trump format, he was asked to simply have students forward their already completed forms for editing and inclusion in the IIP knowledge base from which Spiritual Care persons can gain wisdom for their own interventions in the not-too-distant future.

A workshop participant asked, "How can students’ work possibly be construed as 'best practices'?" The wished-for intervention described in a student’s IIP paper is edited and will be entered into a Spiritual Care knowledge base. Practitioners will access that base by central issue identifier and then make their own interventions. Recipients of that care will assess it. If found continually effective, specific interventions will "graduate" from Potential Best Practice to Tentative Best Practice to evidence-based Spiritual Care Best Practice status.

How can the educator address student low energy and resistance to the IIP paper as just another requirement to be met? By catching the vision of sharing our wisdom to do a better job for patients, and by seeing the urgency of the threat to our status as paid professionals when we cannot communicate our value to decision-makers in their own language: that our care can and must be evidence-based with outcomes met.

…Once Again…

Supervisors, don’t forget to remind your students to forward their Ideal Intervention Papers or Ideal Intervention Forms as Word attachments to Fr. Henry Heffernan SJ at hheffernan@gonzaga.org after review in individual supervision for processing into the growing IIP knowledge base. Have students give you a copy of the cover e-mail message as documentation.

Chaplains, pastoral counselors and other spiritual care practitioners, please forward your completed Ideal Intervention Forms (Practitioners) in like manner. Obtain forms from the e-mail address below.

Please contact the Editor at mariejohn50@att.net with your requests, questions and comments.