Journal of Palliative Care & Medicine
Open Access

Case Report

Can We Judge a Book by its Cover? Hospital Admission Religious Identifiers and Personal Spirituality

Royal Melbourne Hospital, Parkville, Victoria, Australia

*Corresponding Author:

David Glenister
Royal Melbourne Hospital
Parkville, Victoria, Australia
E-mail: David.Glenister2@mh.org.au

Received date: September 05, 2013; Accepted date: September 30, 2013; Published date: October 06, 2013

Citation: Glenister D, Collopy A (2013) Can We Judge a Book by its Cover? Hospital Admission Religious Identifiers and Personal Spirituality. J Palliat Care Med 3:161. doi:10.4172/2165-7386.1000161

Copyright: © 2013 Glenister D et al., This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

This paper compares the religious identifiers patients choose on admission with their spirituality during the course of their care. Informed by George Fitchett’s recent Making Our Case(s) case study project, this project utilizes transcripts of case notes by pastoral practitioners to demonstrate how spiritual assessment can clarify the congruence or incongruence between these labels and individual spirituality. These case vignettes illustrate ways in which careful spiritual assessment can ascertain the importance and helpfulness - or not -of the religious tradition, and discern individual (and often unique) spiritual practice within or without that label. The aim is to highlight the necessity of ongoing assessment over the course of treatment, so that patients receive the spiritual care they need, and aren’t merely ‘judged by their cover.’ The objective is to inform strategies for future provision of spiritual care.

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