Spiritual Assessment Tool - Research Paper Example

? Spirituality is an important part of many people’s lives, and in the field of health care, can be an important part of the healing process for manypatients. There is, however, a significant discrepancy between the spirituality of patients on average, and that of their health care providers (Maugans TA, Wadland WC, 1991). This can lead to many doctors not addressing patients’ spiritual needs effectively enough during general consultation and practice, as well as in specific circumstances. To combat this, a number of spiritual assessment tools have sprung up, hoping to bridge the gap between patients and health care providers in this respect. This essay will analyze and evaluate the ease of use and comprehensiveness of data collected of two different spiritual assessment tools, the FICA tool and the HOPE tool. Spiritual assessment tools are simply something that is supposed to aid a health care provider in gathering any information that may make the patient more comfortable, happy and able to recover. They tend to be a guide to the kind of questions a health care provider could be asking, and as such tend to have a somewhat un-methodological approach. Both the FICA and the HOPE tools are pneumonic devices that are supposed to give a health care provider touchstone ideas that they should inquire about when dealing with a patient. They have some basic similarities and differences in terms of ease of use. The similarities in ease of use have to do with the fact that both assessment tools are based on the same foundation: a pneumonic device intended to remind a health care provider what questions they may want to ask a patient. The ease of use for their methodology is thus very similar – doing the assessment simply involves having a conversation with a patient (that need last no more than a few minutes) in which the health care provider attempts to understand the basics of the way spirituality fits into their patients life, answering basic questions about topics like depth and importance of spirituality, community, religion, and practices (Anandarajah G and Hight, E, 2001). These questions can be relatively open ended to not box patients into a corner and let the express themselves in their own words and on their own terms. This represents a relatively high ease of use, as any information gathered will be of some use to the health care provider and there is no need for an exhaustive questionnaire that could be both awkward and not apply to everyone, causing issues of oppression and exclusivity as well as not giving accurate information. The overall ease of use of both assessment tools is rather high. Though the main structure of both assessment tools is relatively similar, and their overall ease of use is relatively high, there are some major differences between the two tests. One of the most noticeable differences is utility of the pneumonic device. The whole purpose of a pneumonic device is to aid in remembering the steps to use, but the HOPE acronym tends to not necessarily connect to the idea in the best possible manner. The “H” for instance, can stand for hope, but the health care provider will also need to consider sources of meaning, comfort, strength, peace, love and connection (Anandarajah, 2001). Furthermore, P stands for the P in “personal spirituality” or “practices,” so is not necessarily connected to the most important word (spirituality) and the E stands for “effects of medical care” and “end of life issues,” again, not necessarily connecting the most accessible idea (Anandarajah, 2001). HOPE sacrifices a good deal of its memory-assistance to have a good pneumonic device. FICA takes the opposite approach. While HOPE is a pneumonic device that is obviously and integrally related to the idea of spirituality and healing, but whose individual letters do not necessarily fit with the ideas and concepts as well, FICA is a nonsense word with no connection to spirituality and healing, but has individual letters that fit very well with the ideas and concepts. In FICA, the F stands for faith, the I for importance, the C for community and the A for application in care (Borneman T, Ferrel, B and Puchalski CM, 2010). All of those ideas are relatively self explanatory in their application for spiritual assessment. The differences between the ease of memorization and connection of each letter to an important concept may sound somewhat ridiculous, and surely would diminish if used frequently, but as a tool to aid a health care provider in remembering something that they may not use frequently, HOPE fails to connect remembering the acronym to the actually assessments that need to be done, and thus has somewhat reduced ease of use. Much like an ease of use analysis, and analysis of the comprehensiveness of data that these two tools provide likewise has significant similarities and differences. FICA especially has scored highly on a number of scales, showing a clear connection between answers to FICA questions and quality of life in patients surveyed in one important study focused on pain management and palliative care (Borneman, 2010). There are several reasons for FICA’s high rate of success in clinical settings, some of which are, like in the previous setting, related to the pneumonic device itself used. One of the most obvious differences between FICA and HOPE is that HOPE asks about organized religion, whereas FICA inquires about the role community plays in a patient’s spirituality and healing. The difference is a subtle but important one – many people who are spiritual and have a spiritual community they connect with may nevertheless balk and being considered part of an “organized religion” which is the question that HOPE asks. This reveals an important thing about any of these assessment tools, which is that in order to be successful they must be able to strip away and pre-conceived notions or overly leading questions and try to focus on the essence of any question being asked. FICA, because of its ability to cut through the unnecessary, rates very highly on data collection rates and has been demonstrated to show a strong correlation with patient comfort and quality of life, and should be used widely by health care practitioners (Bouthot, Wells, and Black 2011). Spirituality assessment tools form an important part of any health care provider’s tool kit, and can help improve patient care and facilitate recovery and pain management. While every health care practitioner knows that a positive outlook is an important part of any interaction with health, they often neglect one of the main sources of this positive outlook for patients, which is spirituality. Both the HOPE and the FICA assessment tools provide a highly useable metric for doing this, and each can gather enough useful and comprehensive data to be of real use to patients. The FICA tool, however, probably does a better job at being slightly more useable and cutting through much of the fluff of the HOPE test to get at questions that can have more application to a wider variety of patients. Works Cited Bouthot J, Wells T, Black R. (2011) “Spirituality in Practice.” OT Practice, 16(3),13-26. Borneman T, Ferrell B, Puchalski CM. (2010). “Evaluation of the FICA Tool for Spiritual Assessment.” Journal of Pain and Symptom Management 40(2), 163-73. Anandarjah, G and Hight E. (2001). “Spirituality and Medical Practice: Using the HOPE Questions as a Practical Tool for Spiritual Assessment” American Family Physician 63(1), 81-89. Maugans TA, Wadland WC (1991). “Religion and Family Medicine: a Survey of Physicians and Patients.” Journal of Family Practice 32, 210-3. Read More