Responding to the spiritual needs of dialysis patients (Version 3.1)
Research type
Research Study
Full title
How might Chaplains better respond to the spiritual and religious needs of dialysis patients.
IRAS ID
230203
Contact name
Christian Okeke
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Glasgow, Scotland
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 10 months, 30 days
Research summary
This research is to fulfil the requirement of the second part of the professional Doctorate degree in Practical Theology (DPT) at the University of Glasgow. It emerges as a result of the researcher’s work within a dialysis unit in an acute hospital and his subsequent interest in using research to improve service. It will be carried out as a professional doctoral project that aims to help chaplains deepen their awareness of dialysis patients’ spiritual and religious needs, and as a result, improve practice. To answer the research question, the following secondary questions need to be addressed first.
• What are the distinctive spiritual and religious needs of dialysis patients?
• Where do dialysis patients draw their spiritual and religious strength from? Or what are the sources of their spiritual and religious strength?
• What are their preferences or desires for spiritual and religious care support?It will be carried out as an ethnographic, discovery-oriented and reflexive professional research study. It will make use of a variety of qualitative data collection methods, which will enable the process to be both engaging and robust. The study will focus on active engagement with patients through conversations, observations, listening and reflecting on their narrated and self-interpreted illness story, and in the process try to understand patient’s individual spiritual and religious needs, and their personal spiritual frame of reference and how that can be supported. This is in acknowledgement that we live in a world of alternative representations and subjective experiences. These stages of data collection will be collated and triangulated for an in-depth information on the contextualized and particularized spiritual and religious needs, sources of spiritual and religious strength, and dialysis patients’ preferences for chaplaincy support. This information will be shared with other healthcare chaplains and other professionals such as nurses and doctors through seminars and conferences in order to get their responses, which will then be built into the final analysis.
REC name
London - Bromley Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
17/LO/1265
Date of REC Opinion
14 Sep 2017
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion