When a patient asks you to pray: what's a provider to do ?

摘要

The Dr/Nurse pats the patient's shoulder and quickly exits the room. Can you relate to their discomfort? As a palliative care physician and a clinical psychologist who studies religion and health, we, like many of our colleagues, have had patients ask us to pray with them. If you haven't experienced this yet, you most likely will at some point in your career. Faced with this potentially awkward situation, some health care providers ignore the request, change the subject, or make a hasty excuse to leave the room. Others immediately suggest paging the chaplain. Although we will assert that these responses are not the best approach, they certainly make sense and we admit to doing a few of them ourselves. If your medical training was like ours, you probably didn't receive instructions on how to effectively handle this situation.