This study investigated patterns of spiritual care provided to inpatient infants and their parents, based on a taxonomy developed to describe spiritual care activities provided by chaplains. Data from 821 visits with 433 patients were included in the analyses. We applied a data-driven statistical approach, Latent Class Analysis (LCA), to identify patterns of taxonomy items that may be used for spiritual care. Three distinct patterns were identified and a predictive model was built to link a series of predictors to these patterns. Hospital length of stay and whether a visit is an initial or follow-up within an admission were significantly associated with the identified taxonomy patterns. These findings are helpful in understanding predictors and the nature of spiritual care delivery in an inpatient setting with infants. To our knowledge, this is the first application of LCA in research related to healthcare chaplaincy.
Keywords: Taxonomy; chaplain; electronic health record (EHR); infant; latent class analysis.