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It is well known that spirituality is central to the fabric of faith based Catholic healthcare.  Thus, it was a natural fit for Bon Secours St. Mary’s Hospital to participate in the Initiative to Integrate Spirituality and Health to Create More Compassionate and Patient-Centered Health Care (INSPIR).  INSPIR is a follow up study to a previously completed project led by the George Washington Institute for Spirituality and Health (GWish).   What is unique about Bon Secours decision to participate in the study, is that we chose the Antepartum unit for our focus.  All the other sites included in the current study, as well as all of the sites in the pilot study, targeted medical/surgical or oncology units with a focus on serious illness, palliative and “end of life” care. 

The protocol consists of a general research method and four pronged program evaluation which includes leadership core team surveys, unit staff surveys, patient surveys, and the collection of aggregate hospital and unit data at preset time points (baseline, six months and one year).   We began with a site initiation visit from GWish that included a training workshop for the unit staff, but otherwise the specific interventions were left to each individual site to decide what would be meaningful to their particular unit and location.  This was done to ensure that the interventions were a good fit for the staff and patients.

Our mainstay intervention for staff has been a presentation at the monthly staff meeting from a chapter in a book titled Seven Spiritual Gifts of Waiting by Holly W. Whitcomb.  We selected this text because we felt the topic of “waiting” was particularly pertinent to high risk Antepartum patients awaiting the arrival of their babies.  Sample topics have included patience, loss of control, living in the present, compassion, gratitude, humility and trust in God.  We tried to make the presentations interesting and interactive accompanied by an experiential activity.  We recruited a Maternal Fetal Medicine physician as our physician champion.  We chose to use a spiritual assessment tool designed specifically for women during pregnancy, this being completed by the hospital chaplain.  The nursing staff continues to conduct the initial spiritual screening on admission, but we added an additional broader and more inclusive screening question.  

We are currently 6 months into the study and are in the process of distributing our second set of questionnaires to both staff and patients.  Our expected completion date is January 2010.   Benefits of our participation have included expanding and enriching our view of spirituality, as well as viewing each other more holistically.  The barrier we have found most daunting has been finding ways to reach the majority of the staff.   Other challenges include truly engaging both staff and physicians, encouraging patients to return their questionnaires and encouraging staff to write in the INSPIR journal.   The Antepartum Unit has proved to be fertile ground for this study.