Contracted through the Anglican Diocese, comes what is called a spiritual health care practitioner — somebody who provides non-denominational spiritual care to those in times of loss, moral dilemma or lost hope.
With a couple of spiritual health practitioners on the South Island, including the Saanich Peninsula Hospital, the practitioners serve under any spiritual background.
“So they provide non-denominational spiritual care to any staff person, any patient, any family member that requests their services,” said Lorrie Brooks, MHSU tertiary and Spiritual Care.
And they are practitioners not just for one unit, but the entire facility.
The role of such practitioners sees them serve a number of functions.
If the patient prefers to have spiritual care with a religion of their choice, the spiritual health practitioner can try and arrange that for them, arranging for a pastor, rabbi, monk or whatever the affiliation, to come in from the community.
And Brooks said, the connections are great.
“They can do in the moment comfort and care for spiritual dilemmas or crisis,” she said.
This might be a case where someone has suffered a significant loss, an ethical dilemma or any type of a state the person has where they lose hope or joy.
“Spiritual Health Practitioners are incredibly good at helping the individual find that core of hope and joy and purpose that we all have inside us, but which is just sometimes a little hard to access when we’re going through loss,” she said.
Spirituality, Brooks said, has always been one of the cornerstones of the bio (biological), psycho (mental), social (social being) and spiritual model that is used in healthcare, so they see the patient in its entirety.
“The part that spirituality brings that the other health professions don’t particularly target is that very aspect of joy and hope.”
She said although they can medically cheer or heal people, and for the most part psychiatrically provide comfort for them in particular instances, it’s that spiritual core that really gives life meaning.
“A simple definition of spirituality would be whatever a person does that gives meaning and purpose to his or her life,” said Brooks.
Spiritual health practitioners have been at the Saanich Peninsula Hospital, along with other places, for a number of years and Brooks said they generally have one for every major hospital on Vancouver Island.
Brooks said the whole idea of the practitioners being non-denominational, is that it allows a number of spiritual health practitioners to come forward.
They encourage any faith to apply for the positions as they come with a specialized skill set despite being non-denominational.
“These are practitoners that are operating at a masters level in their positions, or a graduate level.”
She said they have also been involved in not only patient situations but with staff too, when they have lost a long time resident.
“And I think that’s one thing that a lot of our community partners don’t recognize is the toll that the loss of a loved one to health care practitioners can have,” she said, adding that their nurses, doctors and care aides become very close with some of the patients .
They want to make sure that the patient dieds with dignity and respect and that they were a part of that, helping bring them some peace.
Brooks said there is also what they call a spiritual health care volunteer, which is someone who also provides a wonderful service completely aside from the spiritual health care practitioners program.
“So the volunteer role is they listen to the patients with compassion, they offer comfort and they respect the values and beliefs of the patients, but they don’t do therapeutic counselling and they don’t try and get the patients to join a particular religion.”
