A retrospective audit of spirituality assessment in palliative care patients in Singapore

Introduction: Spirituality is essential and forms a critical factor in the way palliative care patients cope with their illnesses. It has been recognized as a major and important component of palliative care. There is little data in Singapore on the current state of spiritual care at the end of life. Materials and methods: A retrospective case-notes audit of the current state of spirituality assessment was conducted in the home care as well as hospital in-patient setting. The case-notes audit was selected from patients who were seen by the palliative medicine teams between June and July 2013. Results: A total of 108 home care patient case notes and 182 hospital in-patient case notes were analyzed during the period of this study. Only 24.1% of home care patients and 30.2% of hospital in-patients had spirituality assessments conducted, of which most patients (77.8%) had these assessments completed during the first initial clinical review. The common spiritual themes identified were fairly equally distributed among the 81 palliative care patients in whom a spirituality assessment was performed. Conclusion: Our audit shows that less than one-third of patients have had a spiritual assessment conducted, similar to the results of other studies elsewhere. It is hoped that this spirituality assessment rate can be improved by putting in place a structured spiritual programme in future.