Professional Capabilities, Competences, and Person Specifications
The Capabilities and Competences for Healthcare Chaplains framework has been up-dated and revised over many years. The UKBHC 2020 Spiritual Care Competences For Healthcare Chaplains is the most recent and up-to-date courtesy of NES Education for Scotland in 2019. It seeks to define the capability, competence and scope of practice that are deemed appropriate for roles within the chaplaincy profession. The indicative bands (see below) have been given in accordance with the NHS Agenda for Change job evaluation programme. The framework sets out the knowledge and skills chaplains should be evidencing to demonstrate professional practice. Competence describes what individuals know or are able to do in terms of knowledge, skills and attitudes at a particular point in time. Capability describes the extent to which an individual can apply, adapt and synthesise new knowledge from experience and continue to improve his or her performance.
The Bands 3-8 Person Specifications for healthcare chaplaincy aim to simplify the plethora of chaplaincy titles in use across the UK in accordance with the 2023 NHS Chaplaincy Guidelines for NHS Managers on Pastoral, Spiritual and Religious Care.
Bands 3-8 Person Specifications final
Welsh and NES Scotland Versions:
Spiritual and Religious Capabilities & Competences – NHS in Wales
NES Chaplaincy Capabilities and Competences
Older Frameworks
UKBHC Healthcare chaplains capabilities and competences 2009
UKBHC Healthcare chaplaincy bands and duties framework 2015
UKBHC spiritual and religious capabilities and competences for chaplaincy support 2015
Acknowledgements
UK Board of Healthcare Chaplaincy (UKBHC) acknowledges the vision, experience and expertise of NHS Education for Scotland (NES) and the Scottish Chaplains Professional Leads Group, in co-ordinating the 2020 framework, reflecting current Spiritual Care practice in Scotland.
The UKBHC acknowledges that differences persist in the ways in which Spiritual Care is structured, practiced and described in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. It is the intention of UKBHC that all professionally accredited healthcare chaplains/spiritual care professionals will work to an agreed set of standards by 2023, and that all healthcare chaplains/spiritual care professionals will be professionally accredited by UKBHC by 2030.
The UKBHC also recognises that, for some time now, Spiritual Care in Scotland has been delivered in a generic way and that Scottish NHS Spiritual Care Professionals have not been employed by, or to represent, a specific faith or belief community in the work they do. In addition to this, Scotland has been at the forefront of developing a validated and internationally used tool for measuring the effectiveness of Spiritual Care (the Patient Reported Outcome Measure® or PROM®), an evidence-based and positively evaluated model for staff to reflect on their practice in a values-based way (Values-Based Reflective Practice® or VBRP® ) and an evidence-based programme for deploying Spiritual Care support in the community (Community Chaplaincy Listening® or CCL® ). All of this work, together with a generic mode of working, over the past decade has resulted in different emphasises in Scotland in the structuring and delivery of Spiritual Care and, therefore, in the articulation of Standards and C&Cs that the above 2020 Framework represents.