Palliative Care Versus Spiritual Care

Correspondence

To the Editor:

The investigators from ENABLE (Educate, Nurture, Advise, Before Life Ends) III^1,2 extended the rigorous scientific efforts to proactively implement early palliative care programs.^3,4 Those of us interested in launching palliative care platforms for patients with cancer and their caregivers would be interested to know if spiritual care played a role in the ENABLE III intervention. Were chaplains or pastoral care providers involved? Did the participants—especially the 20% who were not affiliated with organized religion—consider themselves spiritual? Were there correlations between spirituality and outcomes? Was spiritual well-being measured with any of the available tools, such as FACIT-Sp, the Functional Assessment of Chronic Illness Therapy–Spiritual Well-Being Scale?⁵ and, can spiritual care even be conveyed in the context of a telehealth environment? Colleagues who aspire to adopt the sacred work of the ENABLE III researchers would value such information. 

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