Welcome to the SCA Learning Center
The Spiritual Care Association Learning Center is the only organization dedicated to educating professionals from all disciplines in the importance and provision of spiritual care within one’s scope of practice, including:
- Chaplains
- Nurses
- Physicians
- Social Workers
- First Responders
- Palliative Care and Hospice professionals
- Other allied professionals
- Community leaders and organizations
The SCA Learning Center is part of the Spiritual Care Association (SCA), the leading multidisciplinary, international organization in educating, certifying, credentialing, and advocating for the integration of spiritual care in all realms of care so that more people in need, regardless of religion, beliefs or cultural identification, receive effective spiritual care in all types of institutional and community settings in the U.S. and internationally.
Spirituality is a dynamic and intrinsic aspect of humanity through which persons seek ultimate meaning, purpose and transcendence, and experience relationship to self, family, others, community, society, nature, and the significant or sacred. Spirituality is expressed through beliefs, values, traditions and practices.
Spiritual distress can be defined as the impaired ability to experience and integrate meaning and purpose in life through connectedness with self, others, art, music, literature, nature, and/or a power greater than oneself.
Spiritual care concerns the total person and recognizes the interdependence and connectedness of mind, body, and spirit. It provides a dynamic resource for healing and wholeness by paying attention and responding to the unique needs, goals, and resources of each care recipient. Source:
Spiritual Care: What it Means, Why it Matters in Health Care. HealthCare Chaplaincy Network. 2018.
What You Will Find in the SCA Learning Center:
The curriculum and courses of the SCA Learning Center are based on standardized, evidence-based scope of practice and evidence-based quality indicators developed by interdisciplinary panels of experts from the fields of chaplaincy, medicine, nursing, psychotherapy, palliative care, social work, research and policy in the U.S. and overseas.
Our courses include both self-directed instructor-led opportunities.
The Spiritual Care Association is accredited as a provider of continuing nursing education nursing CEUs by the American Nurses Credentialing Center's Commission on Accreditation. (ANCC).
Physicians
Social Workers
First Responders
Palliative Care and Hospice Professionals
Other Allied Professionals
Community Leaders and Organizations
Even though all health care professionals should provide some spiritual care, most are not trained to do so in-depth. While patients do not typically expect to receive in-depth, specialized spiritual care from their physicians or nurses, they do express a strong preference for some basic spiritual care, including listening, communicating and expressing compassion. Studies consistently demonstrate that a high percentage of patients wish their health care providers would ask about or discuss spirituality and/or religion.
Source: Spiritual Care: What it Means, Why it Matters in Health Care. HealthCare Chaplaincy Network. 201,
