GPs and spiritual care: signed up or souled out? A quantitative analysis of GP trainers’ understanding and application of the concept of spirituality

Abstract

Background: GPs have a wide range of attitudes to spirituality which contribute to variations in the spiritual care they report to practice. Aim/Objective: To assess concepts of spirituality and their application in a sample of GPs trainers. To explore statistically the relationship between personal spiritual affiliation, attitudes to, and reported practice of, spiritual care. To examine whether GP trainers consider training in spiritual care to be adequate. Methods: Questionnaire: 87 GP trainers at a GP trainer's workshop using Likert scale responses. Multinomial trend tests to analyse the relationships between "concept of spirituality" and attitude to, or practice of, spiritual care. Cluster and latent class analysis to investigate whether groups of GPs are categorically different from each other. Results: GPs considered spirituality to be a meaningful, useful but unclear concept. 7/87 stated they did not wish involvement in spiritual care, 24 had reservations, 40 were pragmatically willing and 11 expressed keenness. 31/87 report they tend not to discuss spiritual matters. Only 9/87 reported receiving adequate training in spiritual care. Latent class analysis suggests two thirds are pragmatic supporters of spiritual care and one third are tentative sceptics. Conclusion: GPs vary widely in their attitude to and practice of spiritual care. Two distinct groups were identified-tentative sceptics and pragmatic supporters. Training for spiritual care is perceived to be inadequate.

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“…They identified four categories of attitudes labelled as rejecting, guarded, pragmatic and embracing. 27 …”

“…26 Previous quantitative survey work with GP trainers in Scotland found that spirituality was perceived by educators as a meaningful, useful, but unclear concept. 27 Researchers investigating how spiritual health should be discussed in primary care have adopted a variety of definitions drawing themes from traditional religion through to humanism ( box 1 ). One of the most frequently adopted is a consensus definition from international holistic care conferences that encompasses all the concepts listed in box 1 , apart from inner peace, strength and resilience.…”

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“…However, although professional guidance goes some way to outlining what is recommended it is becoming clear that although most GPs think that spirituality is meaningful and important to general practice, many are unclear about what this term means and feel inadequately trained when it comes to applying it (4).…”