Notes on the book by Puchalski, C. M., Ferrell, B. “Making Health Care Whole: Integrating Spirituality into Patient Care”

This book is created on the basis of the national conference, where spiritual and palliative care experts gathered to discuss guidelines for incorporating spirituality into palliative care. The question is vital as in the past years there has been more and more attention given to the role of spirituality within palliative care, its necessary part in caring for ill and dying patients. Simply recognizing the importance of addressing spiritual issues in healthcare proves not to be enough, and the healthcare professionals need to be educated specifically on what spirituality is and how spiritual care should be delivered. 

The book “Making Health Care Whole” is meant to provide necessary definitions of spirituality, describe different models of spiritual care that can be provided by the interdisciplinary team, including physicians, nurses, chaplains, social workers, and psychologists. These models are inclusive and provide tools for planning proper care for each patient. 

Personally, I found this book to be quite primitive and often repetitive. Sometimes sentences seemed to have been thrown into the text without any idea behind them, as if they have been borrowed from somewhere else. I could not help but assume that some of the text has been transcribed from the conference the book is founded on. I found that the author kept going in circles about some obvious ideas. Though, all of the ideas themselves are absolutely valid, the way they were presented in this book was quite discouraging for me as a reader. 

I must admit that probably for people who had never taken into consideration the spiritual or even solely humane aspect of care at all, this book could have been a discovery. As the author fairly notes on page 91, “for some health care professionals, spiritual care may be intuitive but most will need to develop the knowledge and skills for providing high-quality and competent spiritual care.” 

Apart from my personal opinion on the book, I should say, that it does carry some valuable points, one being that the work of spiritual care is done by all members of the health care team at least in some way. (p. 84) This is a valuable point for most readers, as many of us tend to think that spiritual care is provided solely by specially educated hospital chaplains, whereas the medical professionals should be concerned solely with the physical treatment. 

Another important point that is often missed by many professionals is that health care professionals need to have opportunities to understand spirituality or transcendence in their own lives. The best would be to provide health care professionals with such kind of reflective preparation that would help them identify their own sense of meaning and purpose and develop as authentic whole persons. This personal spiritual growth would lead them to such level of awareness that would allow them to be transformed by their healing experiences with their patients.