These pastoral care workers agreed

These pastoral care workers agreed on 3 major barriers to providing spiritual care: inadequate training of health care providers to detect patients’ spiritual needs, inadequate staffing of the pastoral care office, and being called to visit with patients and families too late to provide all the spiritual care that could have been provided (Fig 4). When asked, “How close do you feel that your hospital is to providing the best possible spiritual care to the children and families who use your facility?” the median estimate offered by these respondents was that theirhospitals were providing 60% of what they deemed to be ideal spiritual care.In a space soliciting comments, 2 respondents, both of whom work in different busy hospitals with minimal pastoral care staff, wrote, “I tend to live in the ICUs,” and “We obviously cannot provide adequate spiritual care to anyone with these kinds of numbers. We do crisis.” In a similar vein, another respondent noted that “we often meet many families around the time of death.” Two other respondents commented that “spiritual care is often the first to gowith budget cuts” and “managed care has made the climate in our large teaching hospital become very sparing in their support of a pastoral care team.”