[Music]
Recently there's been a marked increase in the teaching of spirituality throughout the
world, and that's really to ensure a holistic approach
to patient care and student understanding of the needs of patients.
It's also been important to ensure that
medical students feel confident and comfortable dealing with spiritual issues
when they're dealing with
patient care. For some patients, spiritual issues
and issues of meaning and belief can be a core component of their health and their healing.
And therefore it's important that as a teaching University
we embed those concepts into our curriculum.
I believe that for many of our patients, for many of the
physicians that attend them, the concept of
spirituality has been at the heart of their understanding
of who they are, where they came from, and
how they interact with society and how they see meaning in their life. It is fundamental to
how they also appreciate and understand illness;
how they appreciate and understand suffering
and death and dying. And that goes on to how they cope
with suffering, how they cope with illness
how they cope with dying
and with ultimately, death.
For many also how they recover
so there's a link in many people's minds
between their spirituality, their understanding,
of that innate core part of themselves
and, ultimately, healing. So that's where our patients are coming from
and many of their caregivers.
I think it becomes an ethical obligation of
medical schools to at least give their students
an appreciation of that component in their patients' lives.
If they are truly going to be compassionate caregivers.
In my view spirituality
should be included in the WHO definition of health
which says that health is a state
of complete physical, mental and social well-being
and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.
in fact spirituality could serve as a bridge
between the concepts of mental and
physical health so that we talk
about one health because dividing health
into mental and non-mental can
only increase [the] stigma of mental illness. In this medical school
we embraced this concept from about 2005 onwards
and we now seek to at least give our students
the ability to take a spiritual history to understand
that this dimension can be critical to their own patients' healing
and to be able to have a sense of when
a patient may be spiritually suffering at the same time
as they may be physically suffering. If you're not going to deal
with the whole patient, you've fundamentally - I think - failed
in your duty of care. There are a number of
innovative teaching initiatives about spirituality underway
to ensure that UWA students have an opportunity to discuss and explore
issues of meaning and self-belief and how they relate to health and wellbeing in our community.
A new module to teach spiritual history-taking to our students has been developed,
and students are introduced to this in the beginning of their first year
at medical school. We're also reaching out from medicine
to a more campus-wide audience with a broadening unit that we teach
entitled 'Mental health in today's world'. This unit incorporates a
range of holistic approaches towards healthcare including engaging students
in exploring their own spirituality and a discussion about what it means to be well.
For the past 10 years our sixth-year students have all had
a week of palliative care. In this week they get to know one patient
quite deeply. What we discovered was that they all feel quite traumatised
by the fact that patients are dying, they are forced to face the reality of death
This prompted the development of a fifth-year option
where the students can spend two weeks exploring issues in greater depth.
This morning I spent several hours with three students who are doing the option
One is an Indian-background student who is a Hindu;
the second is a Chinese Buddhist, and the third
a South African agnostic Christian. I've discovered over the years
that we get the most wonderful mixture of students, of cultures and backgrounds.
Half of the learning is learning from each other. These students
take turns at leading discussion groups and exploring the issues
of spiritual care in the patients and in their own lives.
So basically this unit runs for two weeks and in that two weeks you get one main assignment. How this works is that
each student gets allocated a patient and we determine the illness and [indecipherable] and our job
is to go and talk to them and then write a report about it. We're not just after a medical
history, so it's not just about symptoms or what kind of treatment they're on.
Trying to find out who they are as a person, so things like family, beliefs,
life story. And from a spiritual point of view we're also looking for things like their thoughts on
the future, and because they're terminal, their thoughts on death.
I think this unit has been a real eye-opener.
If we want to approach [indecipherable] holistically, I think looking at it
from a spiritual angle is so very important. It's what makes them a person.
Currently we are conducting an internationally funded research project
to investigate the teaching of spirituality in university medical education
nationally along with an exploration of Australian deans and educators
- medical educators - as student attitudes
towards the integration of spirituality into the University curriculum.
We're conducting this research really with a primary aim to
identify what is the best practice towards teaching spirituality
and incorporating it into a medical program. {Music fades]