Addressing client spirituality in occupational therapy practice: A qualitative study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: Aspects of spirituality are commonly brought up by clients during times of sickness, disability, and impending death. However, much of the research on how to address spirituality in Australian health care has been conducted by professionals outside of occupational therapy. In this context, this study aimed to examine how Australian occupational therapists address spirituality in their clinical practice. METHODS: This study undertook an interpretive phenomenological qualitative approach to thematically analyse 23 individual interviews of Australian occupational therapists from multiple practice settings. CONSUMER AND COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT: As the target participants were occupational therapists, consumers and the community were not involved in the design of the research. FINDINGS: The three themes that emerged from this study were the following: (i) participants employed flexible approaches when asking about clients' spirituality; (ii) clients raised a diverse range of spiritual topics; and (iii) occupational therapists provided varied responses to address client spirituality. CONCLUSION: The findings suggest that spirituality is a rich and varied part of occupational therapy practice. Many participants had developed creative ways to integrate spirituality into their practice, often without formal training. Therapists' preferred methods for asking clients about their spirituality were generally informal and flexible in nature. Additionally, clients introduced a range of positive and challenging topics, whereas some did not bring up spirituality at all. Therefore, occupational therapists may benefit from using open questions that encourage exploration. The varied responses to client spirituality offer an opportunity for therapists to reflect on how best to support it. This may involve increasing self-awareness of their personal beliefs, establishing referral pathways to spiritual experts, and creating guidelines for self-disclosure and participation in spiritual practices. Improving professional resources on addressing spirituality could further assist occupational therapists in asking about and responding to the spirituality of their clients. PLAIN LANGUAGE SUMMARY: Most research on spirituality in Australian health care has come from other professions, not occupational therapy. This study looked at how Australian occupational therapists talk about and respond to clients' spiritual needs in their work. Researchers interviewed 23 occupational therapists. They found three main things: (1) therapists used flexible ways to ask about spirituality, (2) clients talked about many different spiritual topics, and (3) therapists responded in many different ways. These therapists came up with their own creative ways to support clients' spirituality. The profession could benefit from more tools and guidance on how to talk about and respond to spirituality in practice.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.016 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".