The Ethics of Spiritual Care

This chapter canvasses the broad set of ethical imperatives entailed in the provision of optimal spiritual and existential care. Beginning with consideration of the moral justification of the provision of spiritual care within the context of holistic person-centred care, it moves to explore the nature and quality of the education and training that healthcare professionals should receive to help ensure best practice, noting that lack of training, imprecision in the definition of terms and lack of institutional support combine to create particular ethical challenges in this field. The goal of the chapter is to assist healthcare professionals to develop a theoretically and practically informed framework that can guide them in competently responding to complex patient needs and in recognising the need for the development of organisational cultures and policies that facilitate best practice. Central to competence in this field is an understanding of the nature of spiritual and existential distress, how it is expressed and what barriers healthcare professionals might face in addressing it, both from personal and moral psychological perspectives and as institutional employees.