Abstract
Users of the "emergency care" social service provided in the Czech Republic pursuant to Act No. 108/2006 Coll., on social services, have many needs. Even though emergency care specializes in the needs of maintaining independence and safety, it is not possible to omit the spirituality aspects stemming from the life-long spiritual focus of the users or induced by living the terminal phase of the lives.
To cater for spiritual needs is certainly not the primary purpose of emergency care, but the providers must fully understand the spiritual aspect of a person's life and the service needs to be able to respond to such needs in an adequate way. This led the author of the study to carry out a qualitative research among the emergency care social service users.
Individual semi-structured interviews aimed to find out all aspects affecting due provision of emergency care within the concept of biological, mental, social and spiritual health model. Interim results show that the most frequent reason for requesting the emergency care service is deteriorating health (39.7%) or reduced autonomy (31.7%).
The elderly most often state that they expect the emergency care service to improve arranging for health and social care availability (33.8%) and boost their sense of safety and security (32.3%). The elderly rate their heath at 3.3, the part of their health rated the highest being their spiritual health and the lowest being their social health. 40.0% of the elderly express interest in spiritual care within the emergency care provision.
In the presented research the elderly users (60.0%) incorrectly assume that spiritual care provision is related to faith in God or terminal phase of life.