SPIRITUALITY, RELIGION, AND HEALTHCARE: INTEGRATING SPIRITUAL CARE INTO CLINICAL PRACTICE

Area coordinator: Ariel Dempsey ariel.dempsey@theology.ox.ac.uk

Encounters in medicine bring both patients and healthcare providers face-to-face with the questions of the humanities. Spirituality in medicine is defined broadly as that which gives a person meaning, connection, peace, purpose, or a sense of transcendence, and includes relationships with oneself, family, others, community, society, nature, and the sacred. The experience of serious illness can call all of the above into question. This branch of Oxford Medical Humanities is focused on developing compassionate healthcare systems that attend to the whole person, physical, emotional, social, and spiritual. Spiritual care is recognized as a core domain of whole person care with growing empirical evidence demonstrating its vital role in health (for example, improved quality of life, decreased depression/anxiety, higher satisfaction with decisions regarding treatment, improved coping etc.) Spiritual distress can result in immense suffering for patients and families, and spirituality, broadly defined, can be the source of healing for many people, patients as well as for burned-out clinicians. This hub is interested in the dialogue between healthcare and the spiritual or religious dimensions of human experience and ways in which these can mutually inform and enrich one another. It engages with perspectives from philosophy, theology, history, psychology, the arts, and other humanities as well as medical science. Its central focus lies in the practical integration of spiritual care into healthcare delivery, contributing to more compassionate and holistic clinical practice.