In spiritual care interventions, conflicts frequently arise between cultural beliefs that promote positive social behavior and harmful superstitions. These harmful superstitions can create friction between patients and spiritual care workers. While there is no simple resolution to these conflicts, spiritual care providers must consistently consider them to better understand diverse cultural viewpoints.

Michigan State University

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In hospice care, patients have various responses to their situation based on their spiritual beliefs. This can be implicit or explicit. Therefore, healthcare workers should be educated in patient's spirituality. This is often referred to as spiritual care intervention.

Spiritual Care Intervention

Mahilall, R., Swartz, L. (2021) ‘I am Dying a Slow Death of White Guilt’: Spiritual Carers in a South African Hospice Navigate Issues of Race and Cultural Diversity. Cult Med Psychiatry. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-021-09750-5

‘I am Dying a Slow Death of White Guilt’: Spiritual
Carers in a South African Hospice Navigate Issues
of Race and Cultural Diversity

When designing treatments to account for different spiritual beliefs, there runs a risk of miscommunication. In an effort to avoid being discriminatory, spiritual care workers often use neutral terms that don't convey clear meanings. In addition, different people will have different views of different spiritualities. Therefore, it is important that some sort of universal understanding of common spiritualities is achieved.

Risks of Miscommunication in Spiritual Intervention

Interviews with spiritual care professionals have reported a umber of traits/skills necessary for their work. First and most important is knowledge of different cultures. Next, tolerance of different people is a necessity. Finally, workers must be able to consider cultural while performing their work.

Necessary Traits for Spiritual Care

Although most fields are becoming more culturally sensitive, there is still lingering bias against many traditional cultures. Many spiritual care workers reported guilt from coming from privileged backgrounds and worried they were enforcing existing stereotypes. To address this problem, it would be beneficial to support diversity in spiritual care and educate people about different cultures.

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