Caregiver Outlook: An Evidence-based Intervention for the Chaplain Toolkit

Tasks of preparation and completion - reviewing one's life, assessing unfinished business, addressing relationship conflicts, offering or receiving forgiveness, and identifying wisdom gained and future goals - are associated with quality in both palliative care and chaplaincy care. The consequences are dramatic when preparation and completion at the very end of life are not achieved, and unmet needs in these domains influence caregiver experience earlier and throughout longer periods during the trajectory of serious illness.

Efforts to improve the caregiver experience have tended to focus on skill-building and self-efficacy for providing care, including patient pain and symptom management, and caregiver coping. However, less is known about effective ways to address other elements of caregivers' experience that may influence well-being and capacity to care, namely the meaning caregivers' ascribe to their caregiving role. Research shows caregivers with higher sense of meaning report lower subjective caregiver burden. In palliative care, the important tasks of caregiver preparation and completion are tools through which caregivers engage in meaning-making, identifying purpose, and connecting with what is held sacred.

These tasks are central to patient and family definitions of quality at end-of-life, and the goals and skills of healthcare chaplaincy. Addressing issues of meaning, exploring relational well-being, and supporting caregiver's own sense of loss and hope is at the heart of chaplaincy care. Professional chaplaincy uses narrative pastoral care to help patents, families, significant others, and staff focus on meaning-making and quality of life in the midst of health celebrations, changes, crises, and loss. Clinical chaplains focus on caregiver's specific concerns, values, beliefs, and practices that enhance caring with integrity and authenticity for the purpose of ongoing spiritual assessment and pastoral care planning.

However, both the manner and extent to which caregiver concerns are addressed vary based on family and patient circumstance, time available, and individual chaplain skill. The majority of chaplain's approaches to these concerns have not been delivered or evaluated in a manualized format. The chaplaincy profession's evidence base would be strengthened by systematically exploring the content of such an approach, its impact on caregiver health outcomes, and the ways a manualized intervention approach ("Caregiver Outlook") may serve as a foundation for the chaplain's future teaching, practicing, and researching of systematized spiritual assessment and care planning processes.

The investigators propose a one-arm pilot trial to evaluate the feasibility and acceptability of a chaplain-led preparation and completion intervention, and also to examine effect sizes on health outcomes. Results will permit feasibility and acceptability evaluation of an evidence-based tool for addressing and assessing caregivers' spiritual strengths and experiences of suffering in palliative care. The project will serve as a foundation to understand integration of the central tasks of preparation and completion with other approaches to spiritual assessment and pastoral care planning. Finally, results will provide preliminary data for future large-scale randomized control trials of the intervention.