Spiritual Care is an essential component of comprehensive care, promoting spiritual wellbeing and reducing spiritual and emotional distress for patients and staff. Spiritual care practitioners provide compassionate care to patients, residents, families and staff and work alongside a committed team of spiritual care staff and accredited faith visitors to offer support in a respectful, non-judgmental environment.
Spiritual Care values diversity and inclusion. With a focus on best practices and innovation, the team is committed to providing the highest level of patient-centered care. Join us at Barwon Health and be a part of a caring, supportive, and inclusive culture where you can make a difference every day!
The Spiritual Care team provides a range of services including emotional support, bereavement support, religious care, mindfulness meditation, and more. As part of the Allied Health team, our practitioners work with inpatients, caregivers, and their families to help them access their own spiritual resources and provide support that is respectful of their beliefs, values, culture, and practices.
Specialist care within Spiritual Care
Aged care is an increasingly important domain for the spiritual care field as improved health care improves life span. Residential aged care (RAC) offers long-term care relationships and the opportunity to assess, enact care plans, and work with clients over longer time periods, building relationships and connections. Like the acute care environment, an important dimension of the role involves the care of both staff and families, but because of the nature of RAC the family side of the care is long-term, offering the opportunity to work with families through transition into care, emotional wellbeing in care and through end of life. This rich environment offers a wealth of relationships, professional development opportunities and through those, personal development.
Our team is compassionate, supportive, and committed to providing the best care possible to our patients, their families and staff.
Testimonials
Role: Spiritual Care
How long have you worked for Barwon Health? 2 years
My career journey to date at Barwon Health has been focused on Cancer Services, where I support patients and their families and also staff. As part of the Spiritual Care department, I offer emotional support, a compassionate listening presence, a space in which a person can reflect and explore their own thoughts, with an emphasis on areas such as meaning, purpose, relationships and identity. At the end of the day, a companion through a difficult time.
While most of my work is one-on-one, I also run debriefs, as well as meditation, music, poetry and art therapy groups. I have previously worked as a music teacher, and so I sometimes like to play guitar and sing as part of my role, particularly in learning song requests from patients, or setting a nice relaxing and non-clinical atmosphere for a group of hard-working nurses or midwives.
Aside from Spiritual Care specifically, I am qualified in Grief and Bereavement Counselling, and more recently in Dignity Therapy, a beautiful process that involves creating a life reflection/legacy document for palliative patients, for their loved ones to keep.
I was attracted to working at Barwon Health because I saw an opportunity to bring what for me is a deep passion and my vocation together in one. In the time since, I have been very grateful to Barwon Health and to my incredible team for being so supportive of this career development and allowing me the freedom to really make the job my own.
The most enjoyable part of my role is the deeply meaningful connections I am privileged to be able to make with people during such raw and vulnerable points in their lives. What sets Barwon Health apart from other healthcare services is the amazing staff who I am honoured to work alongside of, particularly the staff of Baxter 6, who never fail to make me feel valued and welcomed onto the ward, and who inspire me every day.
Page last updated: November 1, 2024