CALL FOR PAPERS

Call for Papers: Digital Spiritual Care: A Special Issue

Health and Social Care Chaplaincy (2025)

Digitalized Healthcare
With the digitalization of healthcare, patients now spend fewer days in hospital settings and more time in outpatient care. This confronts healthcare professionals with profound changes regarding how, when and where they care for patients. Chaplains and spiritual care providers are increasingly challenged to engage with this development.

If spiritual care is to remain a central aspect of holistic, patient-centred care, it must use new technologies to care for patients at any point along the continuum of care, develop new models of care and proactively engage with the institution’s digitalization strategy. While in some organizations, particularly in the United States, spiritual care professionals have recently made significant progress in this regard, integration into digital workflows is often absent, recent, ad hoc and partial. At the same time, new digital methods for the delivery of spiritual care have emerged. A widening gap between research, education and practice is evident, and central questions remain unanswered, in particular regarding appropriate professional practices and the availability, acceptability, feasibility and effectiveness of digital spiritual care interventions and related training and education modalities.

Digital Spiritual Care
This special issue of Health and Social Care Chaplaincy intends to address this gap by gathering current research from generalist spiritual care providers (e.g. physicians, nurses and allied health professionals) and spiritual care specialists (e.g. healthcare chaplains). For the purpose of this call for papers, “digital spiritual care” refers to the use of technological means – including the telephone and other telecommunication devices – that enable the delivery of spiritual care where patients and providers are separated by distance.

Submission
Please submit your abstract (800 words) by 1 February 2025 to [email protected] and [email protected]. Articles may vary in length, but submissions should not normally exceed 5,000 words (inclusive of notes and references/bibliography). For more information, visit the journal’s Guidelines for Authors.

Health and Social Care Chaplaincy is a peer reviewed and ranked international journal that assists health and social care chaplains and other spiritual carers to explore the art and science of spiritual care within a variety of contexts. It is a multidisciplinary forum for the discussion of a range of issues related to the delivery of pastoral and spiritual care across various settings: acute, paediatric, mental health, education, aged and palliative care, prisons, military, industry and community organizations. It encourages creative collaboration and provides an interface between health and social care practitioners in the United Kingdom and internationally. The journal consolidates different traditions of discourse and communication research in its commitment to an understanding of psychosocial, cultural and ethical aspects of healthcare in contemporary societies. It is responsive to both ecumenical and interfaith agendas, as well as those with a humanist perspective. Health and Social Care Chaplaincy is ranked 4th out of 644 registered religious studies journals and has an impact factor of 4.8 (SCOPUS, 2024). Submissions to HSCC should be made via the Equinox portal: https://journal.equinoxpub.com/HSCC/about/submissions

Health and Social Care Chaplaincy is published by Equinox Publishing Ltd, Sheffield, South Yorkshire, in association with the College of Health Care Chaplains (UK). https://journal.equinoxpub.com/index.php/HSCC/index