Developing a Spiritual Assessment Toolbox

Developing a Spiritual Assessment Toolbox

Liberty University

Myra Moore

Summary

The word spiritual assessment can be defined as a process in which a person such as a health care provider can recognize a patient’s spiritual needs pertaining to their overall well-being. The outcome of a spiritual assessment can be based upon the determination of the patient’s spiritual need and the evaluation of their spiritual beliefs. This article did a review of five different assessment approaches that have been recently developed to highlight the different phases of client’s spiritual lives (Hodge, 2005, p. 314). These five assessments approaches are spiritual histories, spiritual lifemaps, spiritual genograms, spiritual ecomaps, and spiritual ecograms. This article provides an overview of each of these assessment methods while providing the assessments strengths and limitations. The main goal in this article is to provide different spiritual assessment approaches for the reader to get familiarize with, to gain a better understanding for each of the assessment methods, and for the reader to receive the different assessment tools so they will know which one will suit their client if the counselor is wanting to use these approaches in a counseling session.

Interaction

When I first saw the title of this journal article, I was like what is God trying to tell me? Before I dug into the article, I wanted to define the words spiritual, assessment, and toolbox to help me gain a better understanding of what I perceived what the article would be. When you think of the word assessment, you automatically think of some type of evaluation or a test. The word spiritual has several meanings such as religious, divine, and sacred. When I think of the word toolbox, I think of something that stores supplies, such as screwdrivers, wrenches, and hammers. I believe I was lead to read this journal article so that I can not only do some self-evaluating, but to develop a...