This week, more than 50 health care professionals, psychologists, members of the clergy, social workers, researchers and students from around the world are convening in GW’s Ross Hall to learn about spirituality in health care.
The five-day conference is hosted by The George Washington Institute for Spirituality and Health (GWish), the first center of its kind in the country and the first to be chartered by a university.
GWish founder and director Christina M. Puchalski, M.D. ’94, calls spirituality an “essential” part of health care and says the conference will provide participants with “practical tools” to use in their own clinical settings.
“Ultimately, the goal is to have better systems of care so that our patients have their spiritual needs addressed and their suffering attended to,” says Dr. Puchalski, who is a professor of medicine and health care sciences. “If you don’t address spiritual distress with the same intensity as medical distress, you can’t expect good patient outcomes.”
The conference includes lectures, panel discussions and interactive workshops on spiritual development, research, assessments and the integration of spiritual care in the workplace.
Participants, who come from as far afield as the United Kingdom and Finland, will also review national guidelines for spirituality care, discuss the role of spiritual development in both patients’ and health care professionals’ lives, develop leadership skills and learn how to implement actual spiritual and health care projects.
The agenda was organized by an eight-member planning committee composed of clergy and health care administrators and educators from GW and Georgetown University, as well as GWish staff Barbara Minich and Laura Zaichkin.
On July 12, GW’s School of Medicine and Health Sciences Dean James L. Scott and GW President Steven Knapp welcomed participants to the institute.
Dr. Knapp lauded Dr. Puchalski and GWish for their “pioneering role … in broadening our understanding of what it means to respond to the needs of the whole patient, and of course, the global importance, significance and outreach of that work are evident in today’s institute.”
Josephine P. Briggs, director of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine at the National Institutes of Health, and Betty Ferrell, research scientist and professor at the City of Hope National Medical Center, delivered the keynote addresses, which examined the development of evidence-based spiritual care and National Consensus guidelines in interprofessional spiritual care.
Created in 2001, GWish has a mission of fostering a more compassionate system of health care through research, education and policy work focused on addressing the spiritual needs of patients, families and health care professionals.
“GWish developed the first course on spirituality and health in medical school and developed a set of national competencies in the field,” says Dr. Puchalski. GWish staff regularly work with universities, organizations and medical centers around the world to educate and train health care professionals to integrate spirituality in the standard system of care.
“At its creation, the idea of spirituality in health care was very novel and controversial, so for the university to see it was valid and important was a phenomenal thing,” she says. “I’m grateful to GW for its leadership in this area.”