A Review of: “Developing a Spiritual Assessment Toolbox”
Summary
This article (Hodge, 2005) discusses the importance of health care professionals understanding the spiritual lives of clients through the use of assessments. Assessments help to provide effective, culturally sensitive services (p. 314). Hodge (2005) states the goal of an initial spiritual assessment is to better understand effects of client spirituality on care and service provision. Additionally, an initial spiritual assessment helps to professionals to identify if a comprehensive spiritual assessment is required. A comprehensive assessment should be considered when spirituality plays a central role in the client’s life (p. 315). To grasp a greater understanding for spiritual assessments (Hodge, 2005) discusses in detail the strengths and limitations of five assessments methods. Detailed discussion of each method helps providers select the methods that best fits the needs of a given situation (p. 315).
The five assessment methods reviewed (Hodge, 2005) include, spiritual histories, spiritual lifemaps, spiritual genograms, spiritual ecomaps, and spiritual ecograms. Hodge (2005) discusses spiritual histories as the most common approach to assessment. Spiritual histories is the only assessment with a verbally based approach. This method uses two question sets to aid the conversation with clients. The first set is known as the Initial Narrative Framework within this set tools are provided to aid clients in tell their stories (Hodge, 2005). The second question set is known as the Interpretive Anthropological Framework the purpose of this set is to elicit spiritual information as clients relate their stories (p. 316). The spiritual histories method is the assessment method with clients who are verbally oriented. The spiritual histories method allows clients to relate their stories in a straightforward manner due to...