Advancing Spiritual Care in Everyday Practice (Tending the Soul, Transforming Healthcare)

The evaluation of a demonstration project that provided spiritual screening to identify patients who have spiritual issues at the Erie County Medical Center Family Health Center. The main purpose of this initiative was the effective implementation of the Generalist-Specialist model, a practice model that incorporates spiritual screening and assessment for providing spiritual care services as a component of whole-person care to consenting patients within an academic outpatient family medicine setting. This was accomplished by offering spiritual care services to high-risk patients who screened positive for spiritual distress in an outpatient setting.

Principal Investigator(s)

Sushama Thandla MD, MPH, FAAFP (Department of Family Medicine)
Brent Anderson M, Div, BCC (Let Life Speak LLC)

UB Researcher(s)

Jennifer Stoll, PhD (Co-Investigator; Department of Family Medicine)
Ranjit Singh, MB, BChir, MBA (Co-Investigator; Department of Family Medicine)
David Holmes, MD (Co-Investigator; Department of Family Medicine)

Funding Source and Dates

George Washington University [11/01/22 – 1/31/25]

Project Status

Manuscript in progress