According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, about three-in-ten U.S. adults (29 percent) are religious “nones” – people who describe themselves as atheists, agnostics or “nothing in particular” when asked about their religious identity.
For those who research the intersection of religion and health, this presents an opportunity to evaluate what care for the spiritual dimension should look like in practice.
Dr. Garrett Potts, Department of Religious Studies, University of South Florida. (Photo courtesy of Garrett Potts)
Dr. Garrett Potts, an assistant professor in the University of South Florida (USF) College of Arts and Sciences Department of Religious Studies, and a team of researchers from Morsani College of Medicine and Moffitt Cancer Center recently collaborated to analyze how spiritual care and assessments may be provided to religious ‘nones’.
The findings, which were published in the Journal of Religion and Health, delivered qualitative results from in-depth interviews conducted with five chaplains at Moffitt Cancer Center.
“We needed to ask important questions about how to provide care for the spiritual dimension of patients who do not identify with any specific religious tradition,” Potts said. “This was because there was a lack of research on this group, and emerging evidence suggested that they still have a psychological need to express their values and beliefs, as well as a desire to work through trauma of a spiritual-existential nature.”
Regulatory bodies such as the Joint Commission emphasize that patients are entitled to whole-person care, which they understand as an integrated concern for the human body, mind, and spirit, thus, healthcare practitioners must consider a patient’s distinct religio-cultural background within their regimen of care for the "whole person," according to Potts.
The team began their data collection in 2020, with interviews taking place over web meetings, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The team surveyed five experienced chaplains from USF’s Moffitt Cancer Center who answered questions related to efforts in advancing understanding of why and how spiritual care for religiously unaffiliated populations ought to take place.
The chaplains interviewed for the study shared that their interactions with religious "nones" similarly benefit from conversations that consider the traditions they inhabit, and the narratives derived from these traditions. They also indicated that, much like self-reportedly religious ones, religious “nones” possess a paradigm for understanding themselves in connection to the wider world.
Moffitt Cancer Center (Photo courtesy of WUSF Public Media and USF)
USF Health Morsani College of Medicine (Photo courtesy of WUSF Public Media and USF)
During the interviews, chaplains reasoned that a primary component of spiritual caregiving and "whole person" care is the spirituality assessment, which they said enhances patient-centered care and informs medical decisions that need to be made on behalf of a patient.
“We received responses from the chaplains that helped us develop a spirituality assessment tool that is the first of its kind designed for these patients,” Potts explained.
“This tool will make spirituality assessments more inclusive and patient-centered, and as a result, we hope that it will increase patient perceptions of empathetic caregiving,” he added.
Potts and his team are pleased with the outcomes of their assessment but understand there is more research to be conducted in this area.
“We believe that our findings have facilitated a novel paradigm for supporting the spiritual well-being of patients from diverse religio-cultural backgrounds,” he shares. “And we are especially hopeful about how this assessment tool will impact strategies for working with patients who exhibit no religious affiliation.”
Potts noted that he has been working with Tampa General Hospital (TGH) as part of their Patient Advisory Group to incorporate findings associated with the interviews into their practice of spiritual caregiving to enhance the patient experience.
“As an institution recognized already for providing world-class care, Tampa General Hospital is an obvious and important additional partner in the group’s future work to continue promoting inclusive spiritual caregiving to all patient populations,” Potts said.
“I [also] had the opportunity to discuss our research with TGH’s Clinical Pastoral Education students, and I was very impressed with the formation that they have received from the Center for Spiritual Health and Education at TGH. Both the chaplains working within that department and their CPE students deepened my own understanding of the concepts presented in our research,” he added.
He and the research team also have additional plans in the coming years to partner with TGH.
“The [partnership] will build on the initial work, [which would] not have been possible without the incredible expertise of the chaplains at Moffitt Cancer Center who first paved the way,” Potts said.