Webinars for Free Church and other UK chaplains
November 21 & 29, 9:00 – 10:15 am Central Standard Time/ 3:00-4:15 PM GMT
Session 1: Basic Concepts, Examples, Prevalence, 21st November 2023
Session 2: Harmful Effects, Tools for Screening, Future Research, 29th November 2023
Description: Religious or spiritual (R/S) distress includes tensions and struggles about finding meaning in illness or injury and/or tensions and struggles with what one holds to be sacred. In these webinars we will review the research about R/S distress and discuss its implications for spiritual care providers. We will also look at methods that have been developed to identify patients or family caregivers who may be experiencing R/S distress and possibly benefit from referral to a spiritual care provider.
In Session 1 we will review basic concepts and definitions about R/S distress, and we will look at several vignettes of patients with R/S distress. Then we will examine some of the research about the prevalence of R/S distress and consider its implications for spiritual care providers.
In Session 2 we will examine some of the research about the harmful effects associated with R/S distress. Then we will review some tools that have been developed to screen for R/S distress and discuss how they can be incorporated in clinical settings to improve the provision of spiritual care. We will also discuss areas for future research about R/S distress.
Presenter: George Fitchett, D.Min., Ph.D. is a Professor in the Department of Religion, Health, and Human Values, Rush University Medical Center, Chicago Illinois. With training in both healthcare chaplaincy and epidemiology, he is one of the U.S.’s leading chaplain-researchers. In 1999 he and his colleagues reported the harmful effects of R/S distress in a sample of medical rehabilitation patients. The topic has remained a focus of his research. He is the former Director of Transforming Chaplaincy, whose mission is to promote evidence-based spiritual care (www.transformchaplaincy.org). In 2019 he received an Honorary Doctorate from the University for Humanistic Studies, Utrecht, The Netherlands. Transforming Chaplaincy: The George Fitchett Reader, a collection of his research, was published in the Fall, 2021.
These webinars are free to attend thanks to support from the College of Healthcare Chaplains and the Free Churches Group
Please book your place HERE.