Christina M. Puchalski

TL;DR: This document and the conference recommendations it includes builds upon prior literature, the National Consensus Project Guidelines, and the National Quality Forum Preferred Practices and Conference proceedings.

TL;DR: An internist and geriatrician who has recently designed a Spiritual Assessment consisting of four basic questions that physicians or others can integrate into patient interviews, Christina Puchalski explores how she came to develop the spiritual history, how she sees it as distinct from a careful psychosocial history, and what she has learned as she has trained physicians across the United States to incorporate it into their medical interviews.

TL;DR: Two conferences, Creating More Compassionate Systems of Care and On Improving the Spiritual Dimension of Whole Person Care, were convened with the goals of reaching consensus on approaches to the integration of spirituality into health care structures at all levels and development of strategies to create more compassionate systems of care.

TL;DR: Evidence is summarized for the claim that for many patients, spirituality that includes faith in a higher being is important and beneficial and for this paper the main concern is the less widely discussed but broader issue of having clinical respect for patient spirituality as an important resource for coping with illness.

TL;DR: The greatest challenge faced by the core group was trying to find a middle ground between those who think that PC is the relief of all suffering and those who believe that PC describes the care of those with a very limited remaining life span.