Spiritual assessment in healthcare: an overview of comprehensive, sensitive approaches to spiritual assessment for use within the interdisciplinary healthcare team

The provision of healthcare involves dialogue and interaction between those receiving and those providing care. These interactions incorporate the need for building relationships based upon mutual trust and respect. The delivery of healthcare across all professions necessitates the need to conduct some form of
assessment to identify an individual’s healthcare needs. This assessment should be holistic in nature addressing all aspects of the person including physical, psychological, social and spiritual domains. However, because of the misconceptions and assumptions associated with the concept of spirituality, spiritual needs of the person are often overlooked and neglected in the delivery of healthcare. Therefore, this chapter provides a brief overview of some of the key features of spiritual assessment offering a new pragmatic two-question model for spiritual
assessment and goes on to explore how the model may be useful in addressing spiritual needs in a range of different settings.