Grant: Project Grant - Priority Announcement: Patient-Oriented Research

Spirituality is important to healing and well-being for many Canadians, and yet, the urgency associated with treatment often shifts the focus away from spiritual care. Religious and non-religious people alike can find it difficult to make their preferences known or feel that their spiritual needs go unmet. There have also been significant changes in ideas about religion and spiritual practices, with a growing range of ways to engage spirituality. New accessible and culturally relevant approaches to spiritual care in healthcare are needed. The arts can provide alternative, meaningful ways to connect our internal worlds with something greater than ourselves, and have long been associated with the sacred. However, there is a dearth of research devoted to this topic and the integration of art into spiritual care. We will address this gap in knowledge by developing and evaluating how integrating art with spiritual care works for different kinds of people to improve their health and well-being. We have a unique mix of team members who have established partnerships who bring important ideas to this work. They include spiritual care practitioners, health and social science scientists, patients, Indigenous mentors, artists, and students. Together, we will develop three initiatives that integrate art forms into spiritual care, then implement and evaluate them at three healthcare sites in BC and Manitoba. Based on our learnings, we will develop a practitioner's case book explaining how to integrate arts with spiritual care, provide guidance for clinical practice and future research, and create an art exhibit that illustrates our findings with participant artwork to share with the public. Our goal is to enable spiritual care practitioners to design and implement more inclusive healthcare interventions to serve Canadians in all their diversity. Art can help them do that.