What Do Chaplains Do: The Views of Palliative Care Physicians and Nurses and Social Workers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is well accepted that attention to spiritual concerns is a core dimension of palliative care. It is similarly well accepted that chaplains are the spiritual care specialists who should address such concerns. However, what chaplains do when they provide care for patients and families is often poorly understood by their palliative care colleagues. Having a clear understanding of what chaplains do is important because it contributes to improved utilization of the spiritual care and other resources of the palliative care team and thereby to better care for patients and families. The aim of this study was to describe what palliative care physicians, nurses and so-cial workers understand about what chaplains do. Brief surveys were distributed to partici-pants at two workshops for palliative care professionals in 2016. The survey was completed by 110 participants. The majority reported that they understood what chaplains do moderately well or very well. Thirty-three percent of the written comments about what chaplains do were very general, a quarter were more specific. Only a small proportion of the participants were aware that chaplains provide care for the team, are involved in facilitating treatment decision-making, perform spiritual assessments and bridge communication between the pa-tient/family/team/community. Based on our survey, palliative care colleagues appear to have a broad understanding of what chaplains do but many may be unfamiliar with important contri-butions of chaplains’ to care for patients, families, and teams. These findings point to the need for ongoing education of palliative teams about what chaplains do in palliative care.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.006 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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".