Religion, Chaplaincy and Spirituali

Religion, Chaplaincy and Spirituality in Hospitals Throughout history, people have turned to religion to understand birth, death and the range of human experiences encompassed by illness and disease. Religious leaders have endeavored to provide meaning and a sense of order to these sites of critical concern, often contributing in ways beyond the limits of science and medicine. Religiously-sponsored medical facilities carry on that legacy and explicitly seek to meld the needs of the body with the needs of the spirit, or the soul, as their particular traditions inform them. Hospitals and other healthcare organizations in the United States are subject to the standards of operation determined by the US Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO). Until the 1980s, the idea of “spiritual counseling” was only mentioned in standards of programs specializing in behavioral health care. Changes in 1987 moved several such behavioral health care standards into hospital accreditation manuals in order to include psychiatric hospitals under the rubrics of general hospital accreditation. In the last decade, the quality assurance movement helped shift the evaluation criteria from clinical pathway-specific applications (for example, cardiac care criteria as distinct from intensive care unit criteria) to more general categories of performance competency (for example, health outcomes) that could be understood and compared across departments. JCAHO restructured its standards to reflect this new focus on function and created comparative criteria like assessment, care, education, and performance improvement.