Read Aloud the Text Content

This audio was created by Woord's Text to Speech service by content creators from all around the world.

Text Content or SSML code:

The provision of spiritual care, as an intrinsic part of clinical care, is now becoming the norm for whole person care of the patient. Studies have shown that appropriate spiritual care is optimally accomplished by health care professionals who are spiritually competent, not just by chaplains and spiritual counselors. This means that the spiritual competence of health care professionals has become the next important domain for healthcare administration, primarily because of the need to improve patient care quality and patient satisfaction rates. The need for spiritual competence has also become evident in acute, chronic, and palliative care, when the spiritual needs and distress of patients often emerge, and must be addressed by health care professionals. This became increasingly commonplace in 2020 and 2021, where both terminal patients and their loved ones were in distress because of the social distancing requirements of the COVID-19 pandemic. Health care professionals, especially physicians, nurses, aides, and chaplains had to provide spiritual care as the emergency "loved ones" of these dying patients. The importance and influence of spiritual competence in health care has been studied by several scholars, with seminal authors such as Christina Puchalski and David Hodge arguing the need to integrate spirituality into health care practice in order to provide more comprehensive care to critically or terminally ill patients.