Josephine Myhand
Liberty University
“Developing a Spiritual Assessment Toolbox: A Discussion of the Strengths and Limitations of Five Different Assessment Methods”
Spiritual assessment is the process by which health care providers can identify a patient’s spiritual needs pertaining to their mental health. It can be understood as the process of gathering, analyzing and synthesizing information about patients’ spirituality. The determination of spiritual needs and resources, evaluation of the impact of beliefs on healthcare outcomes and decisions, and discovery of barriers to using spiritual resources …show more content…
In order to fully utilize the full potential of this assessment, clients must incorporate trials they face and resources or methods used to overcome them. One of the strengths of this assessment is it afford professionals the opportunity to learn more about the client’s worldview. For highly sensitive clients, it provides a way to shift the focus from the clients to a more neutral object. One of the limitations of using this assessment is clients who are more verbal would feel uncomfortable with drawing and may want a more direct approach. Another limitation lies with social workers, who tend to feel removed from the process and feels it is poor use of therapeutic time.
Spiritual Genograms can be described as the use of a family tree. It helps clients and practitioners understand the historically rooted patterns through time. These types of assessments are useful when the family system plays a significant role in the clients’ life. It appeals to clients who prefer a structured approach. This approach can place limitations on how clients relate to their spirituality. These approaches are also very time consuming and require a fair degree of professional involvement to explain the …show more content…
They include short descriptive significant dates and depictions. One of the benefits on Spiritual Ecomaps is that they are easy to grasp and quick to construct. However, one of the drawbacks is, they draw attention from the client to the concrete assessment because it focuses more on the environment systems instead of the client’s life story. This can also have a disadvantage because it will hold little appeal to clients who want to talk. Spiritual Ecograms is an assessment that combine strengths of ecomaps and genograms in a single assessment. One of the major benefits of ecograms is the ability to illustrate resources as well as connections between those strengths in a single graphic rendering. Some disadvantages of this approach are that professionals may desire a simpler, more focused, assessment