{"id":570,"date":"2023-05-10T16:13:14","date_gmt":"2023-05-10T15:13:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/oxfordhealth.nhs.uk\/oxcswell\/?p=570"},"modified":"2026-03-20T17:46:49","modified_gmt":"2026-03-20T17:46:49","slug":"post-graduate-certificate-in-psychospiritual-care-2023-24-applications-open","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oxfordhealth.nhs.uk\/oxcswell\/post-graduate-certificate-in-psychospiritual-care-2023-24-applications-open\/","title":{"rendered":"Post-Graduate Certificate in Psychospiritual Care 2023-24"},"content":{"rendered":"

Applications closed 18th July<\/strong><\/span>\u00a0for the 2023-24 Post-Graduate Certificate in Psychospiriual Care, a level 7 (6- credit) course taught by clinicians and academics from Oxford Health NHS Trust and Oxford Brookes University and open to all health, mental health, social and allied health professionals from any faith or none.<\/p>\n

Background<\/h2>\n

Healthcare workers responding to an OxCSWell survey across the Thames Valley felt that spiritual care was not just a core part of attending to the health of patients and service users, but an essential part of their own wellbeing as \u201cwhole persons\u201d, supporting other whole persons through the healthcare system. The survey also revealed that the majority of healthcare professionals had received no training in spiritual care, and felt this was an important but missing part of their education and ongoing professional development.<\/p>\n

This finding is consistent with the wider literature which shows that, although policy guidance may mention spiritual assessment and care as part of a person-centred approach to care, practitioners lack the confidence, pathways, and structural support to deliver spiritual care beyond what was described in our survey as \u201ctokenistic\u201d and \u201ccursory\u201d. A large part of this appears to be due to confusion about what exactly spiritual care is, and who should deliver it, beyond the role of specific spiritual care providers such as chaplains. Practitioners appear to feel anxious about crossing sensitive religious or professional boundaries, and lack supervision and guidance on \u201chow to\u201d respond to what has been described by international consensus as: \u201c\u2026a dynamic and intrinsic aspect of humanity through which persons seek ultimate meaning, purpose, and transcendence, and experience relationships to self, family, others, community, society, nature, and the significant or sacred. Spirituality is expressed through beliefs, values, traditions, and practices.\u201d<\/p>\n

We are clear, therefore, that there is a clear and expressed need for training in psycho-spiritual care, and this has been borne out by the positive feedback received from our first two cohorts of students in 2021-22 and 2022-23.<\/p>\n

“This unique interdisciplinary course has empowered us, as clinical and pastoral professionals, to discover spirituality at the live interface between clinical disciplines, scientific research, and pastoral vocation.”<\/p>\n

— Student from 2021-2<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Arising during the Covid-19 pandemic<\/h2>\n

\u2018The impact of the Covid 19 pandemic on individuals and on wider community and society has shown us (if any further proof were needed) just how important the spiritual and the psychosocial dimensions of healthcare are to so many people. Extraordinarily the subject is all too rarely addressed head-on in professional education. I am delighted that the introduction of this course \u2013 the first of its kind in the UK for health and social care professionals \u2013 will begin to address that gap.\u2019<\/p>\n

—\u00a0Stuart Bell CBE (former OHFT NHS Chief Exec)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the pandemic, death, dying and bereavement, issues of staffing and inequality as well as family pressures, put frontline staff under extreme and sustained stress from both direct traumatic experience and secondary pressures compounded by exhaustion. Interventions tended to focus on the \u2018psycho-social\u2019 fallout from the pandemic, making no mention of \u2018psycho-spiritual\u2019 effects, which we define as \u2018the moral, ethical, existential and meaning-based impact\u2019 of the pandemic on staff.<\/p>\n

Our Post-Graduate Certificate in Psychospiritual Care<\/a> is (as far as we know) the only dedicated programme in the UK which supports practitioners from across the health, mental health and social care system to deliver high quality, socially and culturally informed psycho-spiritual care. With teaching from academics and practitioners from fields across the lifespan representing the importance of psychospiritual wellbeing from cradle to grave, this course aims to bridge the gap between care disciplines to present a vision of wellbeing, enriched by a synthesis of psychological and spiritual approaches.<\/p>\n

The programme supports the development of a holistic and inclusive cross-disciplinary approach to health and social care whereby practitioners are confident to work collaboratively to understand the complex, significant relationships between their patients’ and clients\u2019 medical, therapeutic and spiritual requirements. The course encourages the development of practitioners\u2019 own personal psychospiritual awareness and wellbeing, which is absolutely vital for the delivery of whole-person care.<\/p>\n

Participants will gain a level 7 qualification with 60 credits at Masters level.<\/p>\n

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Non-urgent advice: <\/span>Get in touch<\/span><\/h3>\n <\/span>\n <\/div>\n
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Please do get in touch if you have any further questions, or to receive a brochure with more details about the course, by emailing:\u00a0guy.harrison@oxfordhealth.nhs.uk<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Applications closed 18th July\u00a0for the 2023-24 Post-Graduate Certificate in Psychospiriual Care, a level 7 (6- credit) course taught by clinicians…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":472,"featured_media":95,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-570","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-training"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxfordhealth.nhs.uk\/oxcswell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/570","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxfordhealth.nhs.uk\/oxcswell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxfordhealth.nhs.uk\/oxcswell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxfordhealth.nhs.uk\/oxcswell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/472"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxfordhealth.nhs.uk\/oxcswell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=570"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/oxfordhealth.nhs.uk\/oxcswell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/570\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":586,"href":"https:\/\/oxfordhealth.nhs.uk\/oxcswell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/570\/revisions\/586"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxfordhealth.nhs.uk\/oxcswell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/95"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxfordhealth.nhs.uk\/oxcswell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxfordhealth.nhs.uk\/oxcswell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxfordhealth.nhs.uk\/oxcswell\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}