Defining spiritual care: an exploratory study.

An electronic search was conducted on Medline for the years 1980-2005 identified 101 journal articles with the words "spiritual care" in their title, the majority of which were from nursing journals. Content analysis performed on 28 articles judged to be most relevant yielded 250 unique descriptions of interventions, which were subsequently consolidated to form 66 discrete interventions. Twenty five professional chaplains rated each item on the degree to which they considered it to be part of providing spiritual care to patients. The patterns of correlations among the interventions suggested that most of the items fell into ten major categories and a few minor categories, with only two of the major categories being explicitly religious in nature. The article discusses these categories within the context of pastoral care.