Spiritual assessment description, why it is important in social work, and application
Spiritual assessment in social work is a process whereby health care providers recognize a patient’s spiritual desires, which are associated with their mental health care. Therefore, the spiritual assessment is intended to decide the divine requirements and resources of the patient and their impact appraisal in terms of their effects on healthcare decisions. Ideally, its core aim is to discover barriers associated with the application of spiritual resources in the social work. Consequently, the goals of spiritual assessment are very crucial in the context of social work as depicted in the following paragraph.
The spiritual assessment provides a safe therapeutic situation that enables patients to openly discuss their spiritual needs in relation to medical care. This encourages the use of approaches that are legally acceptable and vital to the patient regardless of either their religious or cultural orientations. Therefore, conducting a spiritual assessment is important since it encourages health care providers to take responsibility and eventually provide the necessary support upon eliciting social history that requires empathy due to negative diagnoses. Generally, the assessment is applicable in situations where the caregiver needs to publish the patient’s spiritual perspective, background, and impact on medical care.
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Strengths, limitations, and best practices to use for each tool
There are four spiritual assessment tools according to Hodge and Holtrop and they include faith or beliefs, importance, community, and address. The tools have the strength of providing clinicians with very rapid and easy means of assessing the patient’s spiritual history. However, this idea has limitations in that there is a need to conduct further research to prove the validity of the preliminary data available at the hospital settings. Again, the use of open-ended questions concerning spirituality is the best practice and should be used for each tool to enhance the collection of a standard comprehensive patient history.
