Development and Progress of a Collaborative Learning Model for Quality Improvement in the Field of Palliative Care in India

Quality is central to healthcare and even more so in the field of palliative care. Palliative care approach is centered around discovering facets of care crucial to improving the quality of life of the patient; be it symptom control, emotional concerns, impact on social roles or reviving the sense of spiritual connectedness. Although there are essential and desirable standards for quality of services, the journey taken by a service, toward quality improvement (QI), is often complex and uncharted. It is up to individual service units to strive toward improvement and reach higher levels of quality. Evidence suggests using a structured methodology for successful improvement in healthcare quality, as most problems are complex and multifaceted. This article introduces the concept and application of QI methodology in the field of palliative care in India and provides an overview of the first cohort of QI projects, facilitated through an international collaborative. The sequence of training, the tools, and the key ingredients for success are enumerated.

Imbuing Occupations with Spiritual Significance Fosters Experiences of Hope

In theories of occupational therapy, occupation serves as a conduit for creating meaning and well-being. A crucial component of occupational therapy is developing and maintaining hope of clients during periods of major difficulty. Understanding the relationship between hope and occupation can prove helpful in stressful situations, such as caring for children with chronic illnesses. The aim of the present study was to identify occupations that foster experiences of hope among mothers of adult children with mental illness. A qualitative approach, informed by a constructivist framework and thematic analysis, was used to interpret and explicate relevant occupation-related themes that fostered hope in four mothers. The mother-participants reported engaging in various occupations, yet only occupations that were imbued with spiritual significance fostered experiences of hope. This study brings to the forefront of occupational therapy discourse the issue of spiritual connectedness as a potential link between occupations and hope.

Measuring souls: Psychometry, female instruments, and subjective science, 1840–1910

This essay focuses on the history of psychometry, the science of soul measuring. For its founder, Dr Joseph Rodes Buchanan, the soul was simultaneously an object for anthropological research and a measuring instrument capable of revealing human character, interpreting natural history, and demonstrating the reality of an immortal soul. Psychometry taught that human souls, especially those of women, were capable of acting as instruments because they could feel the mysterious energies that people and objects radiated. Although orthodox male scientists rejected the visions of sensitive women as the antithesis of reliable data, psychometric researchers believed that the feelings of women were both the instruments and information that made their science possible. Psychometry promised to revolutionize science by insisting that sympathy and subjectivity, not detachment and objectivity, ought to undergird research. Yet as male experimenters worked to prove psychometry’s effectiveness, they almost invariably cast themselves as detached observers accurately recording the data provided by their female instruments. Thus, despite pushing for scientific reform, the methods and discourse of male psychometric experimenters eroded their field’s core arguments about connectedness and subjectivity and, instead, reinforced the notion that detachment and objectivity were essential to legitimate science. Challenges to objectivity could prove just how thoroughly it dominated scientific discourse and practice. Still, some psychometers, particularly women who practiced at home, were untroubled by the fact that their research was predicated on subjective feelings, and psychometry remained a viable pursuit among spiritualists even as it faded from the realm of science. Psychometry emerged and, ultimately, fractured amid tensions between widespread enthusiasm for sciences that emphasized spiritual connectedness and the mounting pressure to legitimize scientific knowledge through the language and practices of objectivity.

For the love of our children: an Indigenous connectedness framework

This article draws on Indigenous literature to develop a conceptual framework that makes visible Indigenous child wellbeing. A process of qualitative content analysis identified and examined the core concepts and mechanisms of Indigenous wellbeing. Central to the framework is the concept of connectedness. The premise of this article is that deepening our understanding of Indigenous connectedness can assist with the restoration of knowledge and practices that promote child wellbeing. When children are able to engage in environmental, community, family, intergenerational and spiritual connectedness, this contributes to a synergistic outcome of collective wellbeing. The Indigenous Connectedness Framework may be particularly useful to Indigenous communities that directly serve children. The hope is that communities can adapt the Indigenous Connectedness Framework to their particular history, culture, stories, customs and ways of life.

Mother Earth as Metaphor: A Healing Pattern of Grieving and Giving Birth

Mother Earth is often revered as a goddess in world mythology, but seldom recognized as also an important metaphor in the biblical theology of Old and New Testaments. The image of the earth as grieving mother is a recurrent theme, used in Scripture to symbolize the movement from tragedy and loss to the beginnings of hope. It is an image rich in implications for a theological approach to ecological questions, a search for human and sexual wholeness in a technological age, and a study of the relationship of biblical thought to the universal process of mythogenesis. More than this, however, it touches most deeply the human quest for the lost mother and the role of Christ's passion in the renewal of spiritual connectedness to the natural world.