Encouraging a broad, compassionate, humanistic approach to spirituality, this book shows how patients' spiritual needs can be communicated well within interdisciplinary teams, leading to better patient wellbeing. This book describes the art of charting patients' spiritual perspectives in an open way that will help physicians and nurses to better direct medical care. It includes practical information on how to distil spiritual needs into pragmatic language, helping to demystify spiritual experience. Drawing on his extensive practical experience, the author also suggests key points to emphasise that will enrich chart notes for medical records, including brief, relative narratives, trusting one's own impressions, reflecting holistically on the patient's life, patient attitudes towards treatment and recovery, and describing families' opinions on the health care situation of their loved one. The book shows healthcare professionals of all disciplines how to engage in a shared responsibility for the spiritual care of their patients.

This accessible primer sets out the core elements and methods of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE), and shows how to use it most effectively to improve clinicians' capacity for spiritual care. The guide explains how to learn best from verbatim sessions, open agenda groups and writing projects. It shows how the primary learning modalities of CPE add competence to a spiritual caregiver's practice, suggesting helpful ways to reflect on spiritual care encounters from varying perspectives. It recommends ways to collaborate with a peer group, enhance frameworks of understanding people, improve self-awareness and broaden one's scope of caring while also deepening it. Written by an experienced supervisor of the Association for Clinical Pastoral Education, this guide is an essential introduction for anyone seeking to foster positive attitudes and practice of spiritual care in hospitals, hospices and other clinical settings.