Spiritual Caregiving: Healthcare as a Ministry

Healthcare providers are faced with a daunting job. Daily, they have encounters with those who are wounded and broken by disease - physical, emotional, cognitive and spiritual disease. Patients look to their caregivers for healing, for advice, for comfort and solace. But when the caregivers are too busy, too tired and too pulled by what seem to be tangential issues to be fully present to the patients, they too can experience a sense of disease . Where is the joy in serving? How can they recapture the initial dream that motivated them to enter the healthcare professions? This book examines the spiritual vision that initially motivated and continues to nourish many caregivers. One can look at healthcare as something more than a business concerned with the bottom line, but rather as a ministry and what that ministry means to patients. This book seeks to inspire, motivate and instruct healthcare professionals regarding the integration of the spiritual dimension into their practices. Through the broadening of care to include awareness, recognition and responsiveness to the spiritual needs of others, healthcare professionals - from the physician to the nursing assistant and the hospital