Transcending differences to study the transcendent: an exploratory study of researchers’ and chaplains’ reflections on interdisciplinary spiritual care research collaboration

BMC Palliative Care

Research Article

William T Summerfelt¹  Allison Kestenbaum²  Diane J Wilkie³  Dane Sommer⁴  Annette K Olsen⁵  Angelika Zollfrank⁶  Karen Steinhauser⁷  Marilyn JD Barnes⁸  George Fitchett⁹  Tracy A Balboni^1,10  Tammie E Quest^1,11  Ellen L Idler^1,12  George Handzo^1,13  Kevin Massey^1,14  John Lantos^1,15  Laura B Dunn^1,16  Linda Emanuel^1,17  Richard A Powell^1,18 

[1] Advocate Health Care, Downers Grove, Chicago, Illinois, USA;Association of Clinical Pastoral Education, Center for Pastoral Education, The Jewish Theological Seminary, New York, USA;Center of Excellence for End-of-Life Transition Research, Department of Biobehavioral Health Science, College of Nursing, University of Illinois at Chicago, Illinois, USA;Chaplaincy Services, Children’s Mercy Hospital, Kansas City, Missouri, USA;Clinical Administrative Chaplain, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina, USA;Clinical Pastoral Education, Yale-New Haven Hospital, New Haven, CT, USA;Department of Medicine, Duke University, North Carolina, USA;Department of Mission and Spiritual Care, Advocate Lutheran General Hospital, Chicago, Illinois, USA;Department of Religion, Health and Human Values, Rush University Medical Center, College of Health Sciences, Rush University, Chicago, Illinois, USA;Departments of Radiation Oncology, Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women’s Cancer Center, Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA;Emory Palliative Care Center, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA;Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA;Health Services, Research and Quality, HealthCare Chaplaincy Network, New York, USA;Mission and Spiritual Care, Advocate Lutheran General Hospital, Chicago, Illinois, USA;Pediatrics, Children’s Mercy Hospital and University of Missouri at Kansas City, Kansas City, Missouri, USA;Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry, UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, University of California, San Francisco, USA;Research and Education, HealthCare Chaplaincy Network, 65 Broadway, 12th Floor, 10006-2503, New York, NY, USA;Geriatric Medicine and Buehler Center on Aging, Health & Society, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, Chicago, USA;Research, HealthCare Chaplaincy Network, New York, USA;Global Health Researcher, Nairobi, Kenya;

关键词: Spiritual;    Care;    Biomedical;    Interdisciplinary;    Collaboration;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s12904-015-0004-4

 received in 2014-08-07, accepted in 2015-03-04,  发布年份 2015

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundDespite recognition of the centrality of professional board-certified chaplains (BCC) in palliative care, the discipline has little research to guide its practices. To help address this limitation, HealthCare Chaplaincy Network funded six proposals in which BCCs worked collaboratively with established researchers. Recognizing the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration in the development of a new field, this paper reports on an exploratory study of project members’ reflections over time on the benefits and challenges of conducting inter-disciplinary spiritual care research.MethodsData collection occurred in two stages. Stage 1 entailed two independent, self-reflective focus groups, organized by professional discipline, mid-way through the site projects. Stage 2 entailed end-of-project site reports and a conference questionnaire.ResultsEighteen professionals participated in the group discussions. Stage 1: researchers perceived chaplains as eager workers passionately committed to their patients and to research, and identified challenges faced by chaplains in learning to conduct research. Chaplains perceived researchers as passionate about their work, were concerned research might uncover negative findings for their profession, and sensed they used a dissimilar paradigm from their research colleagues regarding the ‘ways of relating’ to knowledge and understanding.Stage 2: researchers and chaplains noted important changes they ascribed to the interdisciplinary collaboration that were classified into six domains of cultural and philosophical understanding: respect; learning; discovery; creativity; fruitful partnerships; and learning needs.ConclusionsChaplains and researchers initially expressed divergent perspectives on the research collaborations. During the projects’ lifespans, these differences were acknowledged and addressed. Mutual appreciation for each discipline’s strengths and contributions to inter-professional dialogue emerged.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Powell et al.; licensee BioMed Central. 2015. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.