Talking about Faith increases Hospital
Patients’ Overall Satisfaction
Newswise, July 14, 2011 — Hospitalized
patients who had conversations about
religion and spirituality with the
healthcare team were the most satisfied with
their overall care. However, 20 percent of
patients who would have valued these
discussions say their desires went unmet,
according to a new study by Joshua Williams
from the University of Chicago and his
colleagues.
Their work appears online in the Journal
of General Internal Medicine, published
by Springer.
Religious and spiritual concerns are
particularly prominent during times of
illness, suffering and death. Some medical
leaders and policy-makers in the US have
urged healthcare systems and providers to
give due attention to patients' spiritual
concerns.
However, there is disagreement about which
members of the healthcare team should ask
about and address these concerns. According
to hospitalized patients in this study, whom
they speak to makes no difference. The
important factor appears to be that they
have these discussions.
Williams and team analyzed data collected
between January 2006 and June 2009 on 3,141
patients enrolled in the University of
Chicago Hospitalist Study. In particular,
the authors were interested in whether or
not patients wanted to have their religious
or spiritual concerns addressed in the
hospital, whether or not anyone talked to
them about religious and spiritual issues,
and which member of the healthcare team
spoke with them about these issues. They
also looked at patient-satisfaction ratings
for overall hospital care.
They found that 41 percent of patients
wanted to discuss religious or spiritual
concerns with someone while in the hospital,
and 32 percent of all patients said some
discussion did occur. Among those who had
taken part in discussions, 61 percent spoke
with a chaplain, 12 percent with a member of
their own religious community, 8 percent
with a physician, and 12 percent with
someone else.
Half of the patients who wanted a discussion
did not have one (20 percent of patients
overall) and one in four who did not want a
conversation about spiritual issues had one
anyway.
"It did not appear to matter if patients
said they wanted such a conversation," said
the study's senior author, Farr Curlin, MD,
associate professor of medicine at the
University of Chicago. "Even patients who
did not want the conversation had higher
rates on all four of the study's
patient-satisfaction measures." Those
measures were: satisfaction with the
doctors' care, always had confidence and
trust in doctors, excellent teamwork among
doctors and nurses, and overall care was
excellent.
The authors also found that older patients,
African Americans, women, those who were
less educated and those in severe pain were
more likely to have discussed their
religious and spiritual concerns with
someone in the hospital.
The authors conclude: "Many more inpatients
desire conversations about religious and
spiritual concerns than actually experience
such conversations. Our findings suggest
that physicians, nurses, healthcare
organizations, and pastoral care departments
may address an unmet need and simultaneously
improve patient satisfaction by talking to
patients about religious and spiritual
concerns in the inpatient setting."
