Spirituality in Nursing

Spirituality in nursing is increasingly gaining prominence as a way to “restore wholeness” and promote health and well being of patients in all dimensions of their being.

Spiritual care focuses on holistic healing, whereas contemporary medicine only focuses on treating the disease affecting you, but it cannot take away the anguish, apprehension, or anxiety that affects your mind, which may result all sorts of physical ailments affecting your body.

Defining Spiritual Care

Spiritual care is just another way of taking care of people who need more than just physical help. In everyday life, you may have come across people who are suffering from extreme trauma, disappointment, and disillusionment. No medical treatment can effectively treat these mental conditions.

However, it is here that spiritual care comes in, which heals you from within, and this is probably one of the prime reasons why spirituality in nursing is gaining popularity.

It is hard to define where spiritual care begins and where it ends. You may have seen at work several workshops conducted to uplift the mental moods of people. Spirituality enables you to connect to your inner self, achieving harmony between your mind, body, and spirit.

Practicing Spiritual Care in Nursing

Nursing is a noble profession and spiritual care in nursing has its own rewards. In order to provide spiritual care to your patients, you need to first practice it upon your own self. Nurses must be prepared to provide holistic care to their patients. Spiritual care fits easily into the entire process of diagnosis, assessment, planning, and evaluation, with a primary goal to mobilize the patient's spiritual resources. Spiritual care in nursing focuses on responding to a client's expressed needs based on a relationship of trust between the nurse and client.

There are certain practices that you can learn to enable spirituality in the workplace and help those who need your healing touch. Some of the practices include:

• Adopt a caring attitude toward the needy. Everyone needs to hold someone’s hand at some point in their life. Give you hand for someone to hold on to!
• Recognize the needs of different people and respond to each need appropriately. Some people need someone to talk to while some others may need someone to help them read. Spirituality in nursing is all about extending warmth and caring to the less fortunate people.
• You need to use your observation for identifying the various indicators for spiritual need. You need to start by identifying the disposition of people, and it will help you determine the type of spiritual care they will require. Some people may be withdrawn, some would be sad, and some would be very attached to their personal artifacts, etc.
• Give your time! One of the most salient aspects of spirituality is that you need to share your spiritual part with others. When you give time to others and listen to their problems, empathizing and responding even to trivial concerns, you end up mitigating their miseries, since this acts as therapeutic for patients when it comes to meeting their need for hope, love and relatedness. However, this is one aspect that you must recognize as a nurse and offer appropriate care to the patients. Giving a dying patient the hope of life may work wonders for them, often freeing them from their negative thoughts that have chained them due to illness.

Undoubtedly a united approach toward spirituality in nursing practice will enhance the quality of patient care. However, this will require unity and teamwork on the part of all nurses in the profession to provide consistent and ongoing holistic care.

Read what you can learn from my services. You can take a consultation to learn how to introduce spirituality in your nursing or to support the healing process of your patients and much more.

Have a question about spiritual care ? Contact me. I'll be happy to help.

Return to "What is Spirituality"

Return to Home Page "Spirituality and Health" from "Spirituality in Nursing"