Spiritual Care Competencies 

Spiritual Care is a shared responsibility of physicians, nurses, psychotherapists, chaplains, and other health professionals. It addresses patients’ spiritual needs, resources, and concerns.

To address patients’ spiritual needs, specific competencies are required to recognize, communicate about, and address a person’s spiritual and existential needs. These competencies can be developed through training.

The Spiritual Care Competencies Questionnaire (SCCQ), developed by Eckhard Frick and Arndt Büssing,  can be used to assess the competencies of care teams and to evaluate the outcomes of Spiritual Care competency training courses.

While other instruments have been designed to assess Spiritual Care competencies in conjunction with religious beliefs, primarily among nurses, the SCCQ was designed for use among both health professionals and pastoral workers and was validated in both groups. 

The SCCQ does not assume that Spiritual Care providers have to be religious and is therefore also applicable to people in more secular societies.

 *Frick E, Theiss M, Rodrigues Recchia D, Büssing A (2019) Validierung einer deutschsprachigen Skala zur Messung der Spiritual Care Kompetenz. Spiritual Care 2019; 8(2) aop (https://doi.org/10.1515/spircare-2018-0066)