Spiritual Care Association (US) PD e-Learning Modules
Enhance your skills and knowledge with these professional development modules, offered in partnership with the Spiritual Care Association (SCA) in the United States. These courses are designed to support the continuous growth of spiritual care practitioners and healthcare professionals, offering cutting-edge insights and practical tools. Whether you are looking to deepen your understanding of best practices, improve patient care, or develop new competencies, our modules provide comprehensive learning opportunities focused on spiritual care.
While these courses primarily feature US-based content, they offer valuable insights that can be adapted to the Australian healthcare context, providing a solid foundation for your professional development.
What Every Health Care Professional Needs to Know about Spiritual Care
This self-guided course is for those of all health care disciplines, settings, and roles who desire to know more about being a spiritual care generalist within their scope of practice.
Major Religious Traditions and Spiritual Care
This course provides spiritual care practitioners, counselors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals an overview of the five major religious traditions: Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism as well as the growing population that refers to themselves as “nones” or “spiritual but not religious”.
Powerful Communication Techniques
This course begins by looking at both definitions and theories of communication, in order to better understand the many variables that impact effective communication. Topics include active listening skills, the impact nonverbal communication has on face-to-face interactions, and group communication.
More than Listening: Counseling Skills
This course will provide the learner with key background and skills practice in order to better attend to the psychological needs of those under their care through brief psychotherapeutic methods, psychological first aid, family systems theory and grief counseling.
What We Hear and Say: Spiritual Assessment and Documentation
This course discusses the importance of spiritual care providers incorporating into their practice an intentional, informed, and skilled assessment process, along with thorough and clear documentation of their spiritual care.
Values, Obligations and Rights: Health Care Ethics
This course is designed to introduce the concepts of biomedical ethics and assist spiritual care providers in understanding and applying those concepts to daily professional practice. It includes information on how diverse beliefs and values may impact a patient or family’s experience and decision-making.
Care for All: Cultural Competence, Inclusion and Vulnerable Populations
This course focuses on understanding the scope and importance of culture and inclusion, including its influences upon patients and families, the multidisciplinary team, and the healthcare or spiritual care provider.
When Care is Tough: Supporting the Multidisciplinary Team
This course focuses on why spiritual care providers should intentionally emphasise care for staff, and will explore how spiritual care providers can create a calming and peaceful presence amidst what is often a chaotic and intense clinical environment.
Living with Heartbreak: Grief, Loss and Bereavement
This course describes the process of grief, offers current theories that have relevance to assisting grieving individuals, and identifies sensitivities, skills and tools to assist healthcare professionals in various types of loss.
When It’s Time to Say Goodbye: Introduction to Spiritual Care at the End of Life
In this course, various aspects of end-of-life care will be presented and discussed, including the dying process and physiological changes, advance care planning, conflicts that may occur between dying persons and families, palliative care, and hospice.
The Challenges of Memory: Alzheimer’s and Other Dementias
This course is designed to assist spiritual care providers and other professional health disciplines in understanding and applying concepts about dementia to their care of persons with Alzheimer’s disease and other conditions in which cognition, memory, and expression are impaired.
Talking about What Matters: Advance Directives and Planning
This course expands understanding of the importance of health care advance directives, explains how to educate patients and families about their use, and delineates best practices in conversations about health care wishes and the competent completion of health care advance directives documents.
Caring for the Smallest: Pediatrics
This course provides an introduction to some of the unique issues of providing spiritual care to children and their families, especially for spiritual care providers who are assigned primarily to adult care settings and only occasionally interact professionally with children.
Far Too Soon: The Anguish of Perinatal Loss
This course is designed to introduce the learner to all aspects of newborn death including etiology and epidemiology, ritual, best psychosocial caregiving practices, and the effects on parents, siblings, grandparents, and society.
Building and Maintaining a Spiritual Care Department
This module addresses the basics involved in developing a department, whether as a new director or one who wishes to ensure that the department enhances the work of spiritual care, contributes to the organisation, and meets regulatory guidelines.
Delivery and Continuity of Care for Spiritual Care
This course will guide the learner through an overview of health care delivery and continuity of care with information, activities, and resources.
What We Do Matters: Continuous Quality Improvement within Spiritual Care and Health Care
This module is designed to enable learners to be a full participant in CQI processes and to establish and sustain a CQI program for a spiritual care service using Lean and Six Sigma. Participants will learn the basics to recognise CQI’s underlying assumptions, language, and processes.
