Publish your case.

Much of what professionals know about caring for people through illness, death and existential crisis lives in memory. These experiences are rarely written down in a form that others can learn from.

SpiritRep gathers them. The aim of the project is to develop a publicly available, structured repository of case studies for spiritual care research and teaching, and clinical ethics deliberation.

We aim to make case studies publicly available so they can be used for:

• research on spiritual care, clinical ethics, and ethics deliberation
• education and continuing professional development
• development of case vignettes and teaching materials
• development and evaluation of AI-supported training tools

Why a repository?

A research-data repository is a curated archive that stores a dataset for the long term, gives it a persistent identifier (a DOI) so it can be cited like a publication, describes it with standard metadata so others can find it, and makes it available for others to use.

There are repositories for data in many fields, from infectious diseases to the genetic and genomic data of the zebrafish.

With SpiritRep, we’re creating one for spiritual care.

Why “structured”?

Every case is recorded in the same fields: setting and care context, the roles involved, spiritual and existential themes, and so on.

That consistency is what turns a pile of documents into something you can work with. For example:

• find every palliative-care case in which autonomy and family conflict were in tension
• compare how similar situations were handled across countries, settings, professions, and traditions
• if you’re an educator: see immediately which cases suit a learning objective

Language models are increasingly being asked questions with spiritual and existential significance — by patients and relatives, and by spiritual care providers.

Whatever such a system appears to know about spiritual care it has drawn from what happened to be written down and published: a thin and uneven record that over-represents some languages, traditions, and peoples. AI is only as good as the data it is fed. This principle is called “garbage in, garbage out”.

A structured repository of real cases helps AI systems understand what spiritual care is, and how chaplains work:

• Evaluation. You cannot judge whether an AI system’s response to a spiritual care situation is appropriate without documented situations to test it against, and expert reasoning to compare it with.
• Teaching tools that reflect the field. Case-based training material grounded in what practitioners encounter, rather than in generic advice scraped from the open web.
• A record on the field’s own terms. Spiritual care providers describe themselves, in their own words and across their own diversity, instead of having their concerns approximated by systems trained on everything else.