BACKGROUND Being with dying people is an integral part of nursing, yet many nurses feel unprepared to accompany people through the process of dying, reporting a lack of skills in psychosocial and spiritual care, resulting in high levels of moral distress, grief and burnout. The aim of this study is to describe the meaning of hospice nurses' lived experience with alleviating dying patients' spir...

CONTEXT Pediatric palliative care (PPC) specialists recognize spiritual care as integral to the services offered to seriously ill children and their families. Little is known about how PPC programs deliver spiritual care. OBJECTIVE The goal of this pilot study was to begin to describe the role of professional chaplains in established PPC programs in children's hospitals in the United States. ...

BACKGROUND Religious participation or belief may predict better mental health but most research is American and measures of spirituality are often conflated with well-being. AIMS To examine associations between a spiritual or religious understanding of life and psychiatric symptoms and diagnoses. METHOD We analysed data collected from interviews with 7403 people who participated in the thir...

CONTEXT The National Consensus Project for Quality Palliative Care includes spiritual care as one of the eight clinical practice domains. There are very few standardized spirituality history tools. OBJECTIVES The purpose of this pilot study was to test the feasibility for the Faith, Importance and Influence, Community, and Address (FICA) Spiritual History Tool in clinical settings. Correlates...

BACKGROUND The role and effects of people's spiritual well-being have received more attention in recent years. Knowing the factors related to spiritual well-being, especially in students as the educated class and future builders of society, is too important. The aim of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of education on spirituality through social media in the spirituality well-bein...

Spirituality is increasingly recognised as an important factor in health and coping with illness. This article discusses the relevance of spirituality to medical practice, the understanding of spirituality and the implications to clinical practice, in terms of recognising spiritual distress, ethical arguments of providing spiritual care, and the approaches to managing spiritual distress.

This essay introduces the special issue, provides criteria for evaluating spiritual exemplars, presents a case study to illustrate how spiritual exemplars can extend our knowledge of spiritual development, and makes important distinctions between types of exemplars and between positive and pathological spirituality.

BACKGROUND Organizations that encourage the respectful expression of diverse spiritual views have higher productivity and performance, and support employees with greater organizational commitment and job satisfaction. Within healthcare, there is a paucity of studies which define or intervene on the spiritual needs of healthcare workers, or examine the effects of a pro-spirituality environment o...

OBJECTIVES Studies have shown beneficial effects from practicing the relaxation response (RR). Various pathways for these effects have been investigated. Previous small studies suggest that spirituality might be a pathway for the health effects of the RR. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that increased spiritual well-being by eliciting the RR is one pathway resulting in improved psycholo...

BACKGROUND Spiritual well-being is an important dimension of quality of life (QOL) and is a core component of quality oncology and palliative care. In this analysis, we aimed to describe spiritual well-being outcomes in a National Cancer Institute (NCI)-supported Program Project that tested the effectiveness of an interdisciplinary palliative care intervention in lung cancer patients and their ...