Addressing the challenges of life-limiting or life-ending illness with those in distress demands the best from medical or pastoral caregivers. In this course, students will study, engage, and practice the vital communication skills necessary for empathic engagement with the seriously ill and their families. The broader examination and assessment of palliative care interventions will also be examined and applied to real world case studies so that caregivers can facilitate a greater quality of life for the seriously ill.
This course will equip spiritual caregivers who already have education and experience in palliative care to gain an advanced set of assessment and intervention skills. These students will engage in shared learning, offering to one another the skills they have gained in their work and lfie experience. Students will develop the latest knowledge of issues within palliative care and their effect on effective spiritual care.
Spiritual care interventions with seriously ill persons are critical to a patient's care. It is essential that advanced practitioners within healthcare can sharpen their assessment and intervention skills as they engage people with life-limiting and life ending illness.
Jesus' model of engagement with others is challenging, empathic, and healing in nature. Christians are called to be the body of Christ, and in doing so, believes must develop the heart of compassion and skills for empathic engagement.
Interpersonal engagement and the practice of a healing presence is transformational in nature. Missional Christians develop an interpersonal set of skills that enables the presence of Christ to be felt in the life of someone else.
Effective interventions in palliative care are always contextual, for the right intervention depends on assessment of needs. To offer these interventions with a ministerial spirit is to bring the Christ light into a context that needs it most.
Because palliative care interventions are contextual, they require a sensitive eye towards diversity of language, culture, and meaning.
This course will help caregivers engage not only patients, but their families, colleagues, and others with a more refined set of listening, communication, and engagement skills.
Students will practice their communication skills with others, using an action/reflection model that will help them apply their learning in real-life contexts.
