Introduction

The introduction provides a rationale for this edited volume and presents its main topics: the emerging digital age and the development of electronic medical records (EMRs), the question of spirituality and documentation in a larger interprofessional context, as well as the sustainability of future spiritual care. In the second part, it gives an overview of the state of research on charting spiritual care. Five different but intertwined areas of research are defined: (a) evoking conceptual questions or fundamental debates like that of confidentiality and (b) highlighting the connection between spiritual assessment and documentation procedures, as well as (c) recent models and (d) actual practices of documentation. Lastly (e), we take a look on the integration of patients’ views and perspectives into documentation processes. We conclude this introduction with a short survey of the following chapters.