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Parish Nursing/Faith Community Nursing ...It's your health! |
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Faith Community Nursing Links: |
Research Project: Spiritual Care Provided by Registered Nurses
PROBLEM:
According to the holistic paradigm, the human being
consists of body, mind, and spirit.
While the body and mind issues are well addressed
in health care, it is the spiritual care that often remains a vague and elusive
factor.
Holistic health is expected in the 21st
century.
It is not only expected by society generally, but also
documented in publications by agency accreditation standards and professional
codes.
Just adding “holism” to a philosophy statement or
establishing spiritual care policies will not solve this problem.
Spiritual care is defined as a relational issue.
It has to do with the way people talk to one
another.
LITERATURE REVIEW: There is ample evidence in the
literature that spiritual care provides increased resilience and promotes
healing.
In a recent study of spiritual care received by terminally
ill cancer patients, the 67% of the subjects reported religiousness to be very
important, but 59.7% reported none or limited care from doctors, nurses, and
chaplains. In
nursing education, spirituality is included in the curriculum, but a survey of
faculty reveals uncertainty about what is to be taught.
A
model course was not found. The literature shows a debate about whether it
should be taught.
A study found nursing textbook pages devoted to
spiritual issues ranged from 0% to 13% with few exceptions.
Studies about current nursing practices regarding
spiritual care have not found in the literature.
NEED: Of all groups of patients, the oncology group
logically would be the first group one would expect to receive spiritual care.
If this group receives so little, then what of all
of the other patients?
What are the barriers?
Are educational programs and health care agencies
are typically without well designed programs providing guidelines and policies
about how nurses are to proceed?
THEORETICAL BASIS:
The Theory of
Spiritual Care in Nursing Practice (Battey,
2009). DESIGN: 1) A survey will be conducted to determine the nurse subjects’ rating of the spiritual care they are currently providing. The survey tool to be used Spiritual-Communication Satisfaction-Importance (SCSI) Questionnaire (Battey, 2009). 2) The Solomon four-group experimental design will be used to determine the degree to which the educational intervention, Spirituality in nursing practices: A computer assisted instruction program & course manual (Battey, 2010), influences the perspectives of the subjects in the experimental group. The SCSI survey tool is used as a pretest-posttest with random assignment of subjects to the control and experimental groups.
(bwbattey@comcast.net; Phone 925-706-0442; Fax 925-706-0621)
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