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Conference on Medicine and Religion

Patient-Centered Care:  Making Space for Faith

Nathan Boucher, DrPH, Doctoral Fellow, Duke Center for the Study of Aging; Durham Veterans Affairs Medical Center

Separation of church and state, occurring at the institutional level, is different from religion and politics, occurring at the personal/interpersonal level. There is a tension between these paired paradigms. How do we deliver care that is truly patient-centered, urged by health reform measures, in secular health care settings? This paper presentation will discuss “making space” in two spheres: organizationally and at the bedside. Examples will be pulled from the health services and quality improvement literature discussing new developments in responding to the needs of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian patients and their families. Other strategies will be discussed while highlighting the importance of interprofessional collaboration in each. These strategies will include a) multidisciplinary (medicine, nursing, rehabilitation science, and social services) pursuit of continuing education focused on the religion/medicine intersection, b) a call-and-response style approach to patient communication that opens up space for patients’ responses, c) examination of the service populations’ faith traditions and how these can be accommodated in workflows, and d) unifying community support services with clinical care to create synergies that may improve health outcomes, as noted in recent literature.