Spirituality and Health Summer Internship Program: Adapting Clinical Pastoral Education for Medical Student Instruction in Patient Spirituality.

BACKGROUND

Training in spirituality and spiritual care is limited in medical education. A potentially novel approach for addressing these gaps in medical training is an immersive, experiential internship focused on patient spirituality and spiritual care based on pedagogical approaches adapted from clinical pastoral education (CPE).

METHODS

Mixed method analyses were undertaken of participants pre- and post-program surveys and comments to assess the first five years of the six-week Spirituality And Health Summer Internship Program, modeled on a unit of CPE, for first-year medical students.

RESULTS

On a 5-point Likert scale (1 = poor/strongly disagree, 5 = excellent/strongly agree) participants rated the educational value (4.7, standard deviation [SD] = 0.3) and overall quality (4.4, SD = 0.35) of the internship highly and strongly endorsed they would recommend the internship to peers (4.48, SD = 0.36). Participants strongly valued (4.58, SD = 0.35) the opportunity to visit and have conversations with patients as a core activity of the internship. Following the internship, participants reported significant (p = 0.013 to p < 0.0001) increases in their (1) awareness of how spirituality influences their lives, (2) knowledge of the potential impact of spirituality on the patient experience, and (3) knowledge of the role of spirituality in the lives of health care providers. Significant increases were also noted in participants' comfort in (1) talking to patients, (2) talking about spirituality, and (3) talking to patients about spirituality.

CONCLUSIONS

A medical student summer internship focused on patient spirituality and spiritual care modeled after CPE provides a level of immersion in this content not obtainable in typical medical school curricula.