Resource Center

This paper was originally published in the Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Interdisciplinary Health Team Care Conference, which took place September 28-30, 1983 in Rochester, New York.  It is reproduced here with the permission of the authors.

This paper explores the models used by different mental health care professionals in an ecumenical setting which provides a context and an idiom for religious concerns of the client.

This paper seeks to explore the following questions:

1. Who (which professional disciplines) assesses religious and spiritual needs and how are these needs assessed by each profession?
2. Would an interdisciplinary approach increase the possibility for spiritual assessment and response to spiritual needs?
3. Is the assessment of spiritual needs important in making correct diagnoses?

This paper makes the assumption that spiritual care is a legitimate part of health care and that the spiritual needs of clients deserve attention form the entire health care team even though clergy persons have a specific and specialized role in this area. This paper also attempts to identify the key focus of different health care professional's responses to the spiritual condition of a person through an exploration of the model they use most typically, namely the medical, the humanistic, the nursing and the pastoral models respectively. This is done by looking at each model in terms of content, diagnostic focus, language treatment goals and primary qualities in the health provider.