Equipping healthcare professionals to care for the whole person

Western medical education has only recently sought to attend to the spiritual aspects of the patient. The overwhelming evidence of the role the spiritual plays in health and disease has led to movement to adopt a bio-psycho-social-spiritual model of care. However, these efforts often lack wholistic integration. The purpose of this article is to describe a program and international network helping to address the need for curricula and methods to educate healthcare professionals in whole person care wholistically and to make the availability of these resources more widely known to those likely to benefit from and use them. The UK Christian charity PRIME: Partnerships in International Medical Education provides a free curriculum and training opportunities for this purpose. PRIME’s approach and course have been widely sought and accepted by professionals from different cultures and faith groups and has developed into an international network.