Budgeting for the Soul: The Cost Conscious Case for Adding Spiritual Care to the Palliative IDT

Key Message: This session emphasizes the importance of advocating for spiritual care in palliative teams by using data and metrics. We’ll explore how measurable outcomes like team sustainability, patient satisfaction, and reduced burnout can demonstrate spiritual care’s value, aligning compassionate care with organizational goals to secure leadership support.

Abstract: As healthcare shifts toward value-based care, palliative care teams must demonstrate both compassionate service and measurable outcomes. Spiritual care—often underfunded and undervalued—plays a crucial role in this transformation (Best, Vivat, & Gijsberts, 2023). While its emotional and existential value is widely recognized, its operational and financial contributions often go unacknowledged. This session presents a framework for making the business case for integrating spiritual care into interdisciplinary palliative care teams.

Spiritual care has a profound impact on team function and resilience. The integration of chaplains allows clinicians to focus on their clinical expertise, trusting that existential distress, grief, and spiritual needs are being addressed by trained professionals. This redistribution of emotional labor leads to improved team efficiency, reduced burnout, and enhanced staff retention. Data shows that teams with integrated spiritual care experience lower turnover rates, greater job satisfaction, and improved team cohesion, all of which translate into more sustainable, high-performing care teams. (Lazor et al., 2025) For patients and families, spiritual care has a positive impact on end of life outcomes, while unaddressed spiritual care needs are associated with decreased quality of life (Balboni et al., 2022).

This session will explore how to capture and communicate these impacts to health system leaders. By focusing on measurable outcomes such as family satisfaction, quality, team sustainability, and staff well-being, we will highlight how spiritual care not only aligns with mission-driven care but also delivers on financial goals. We’ll demonstrate how spiritual care enhances the value of care across the continuum, leading to improved experiences for patients, families, and care providers.

Participants will leave with practical strategies to assess and communicate the measurable contributions of spiritual care, build stakeholder buy-in, and advocate for continued investment in this vital discipline—where mission and margin are aligned, driving both compassionate care and organizational success.

References: (1) Best, M. C., Vivat, B., & Gijsberts, M.-J. (2023). Spiritual care in palliative care. Religions, 14(3), 320. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14030320
(2) Lazor, P., Weiner, J., Lawton, A., et al. (2025). Evaluation of spiritual care services at Cedars Sinai hospitals: employees’ views. Journal of Health Care Chaplaincy, 31(3), 216–235. https://doi.org/10.1080/08854726.2025.2506919
(3) Balboni, T. A., VanderWeele, T. J., Doan-Soares, S. D., et al.. (2022). Spirituality in serious illness and health. JAMA, 328(2), 184. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2022.11086