Increasingly, social workers are being called on to conduct spiritual assessments, yet few assessment methods have appeared in academic literature. This article reviews five complementary assessment approaches that have recently been developed to highlight different facets of clients' spiritual lives. Specifically, one verbal model, spiritual histories, is discussed, along with four diagrammati...

Traumatic events may lead to dramatic changes in spirituality. The objective of this study was to explore whether posttraumatic spiritual transformation results not just from the traumatic event, but from spiritual experience during the crisis. The hypothesis tested was that survivors of a brush with death who had spiritual “near-death experiences” have greater spiritual growth and lesser spiri...

PURPOSE/OBJECTIVES To investigate spiritual transformation among patients with cancer. DESIGN Longitudinal. SETTING A university medical center in the midwestern United States. SAMPLE 47 adult cancer survivors. METHODS Patients were asked about spirituality, religious and spiritual importance, religious coping, and spiritual gain and decline at baseline as well as nine months post-treat...

UNLABELLED BACKGROUND Spiritual needs of cancer patients should be assessed and discussed by healthcare professionals. Neurosurgical nurses need to be able to assess and support neuro-oncology patients with their spiritual needs from diagnosis and throughout their hospital stay. METHODS Data were collected through questionnaires using a Critical Incident Technique (CIT) from neurosurgical ...

AIMS AND OBJECTIVES To explore Singapore hospice nurses' perspectives of spirituality and spiritual care. DESIGN A descriptive, cross-sectional design was used. BACKGROUND Spiritual care is integral to providing quality end-of-life care. However, patients often report that this aspect of care is lacking. Previous studies suggest that nurses' neglect of this aspect of care could be attribute...

CONTEXT Spirituality, religiosity, and spiritual pain may affect advanced cancer patients' symptom expression, coping strategies, and quality of life. OBJECTIVES To examine the prevalence and intensity of spirituality, religiosity, and spiritual pain, and how spiritual pain was associated with symptom expression, coping, and spiritual quality of life. METHODS We interviewed 100 advanced can...

One of the most crucial palliative care challenges is in determining how patients’ needs are defined and assessed. Although physical and psychological needs are commonly documented in patient’s charts, spiritual needs are less frequently reported. The aim of this review was to determine which explicit, longitudinal documentation of spiritual concerns would sufficiently affect clinical care to a...

As nurse researchers, we were studying Iranian nurses’ competencies in spiritual care recently. Using a selfdirected instrument, we surprisingly found that nurses have low acquaintance with the spirituality concept and how to provide spiritual care. Similar to other caring activities and procedures, spiritual care improves people’s spiritual well-being and performance as well as the quality of ...

The aim of this review article is describing a research on spiritual and religious interventions in Iran. An integrative review was conducted to determine the state of the science in Iran. Iranmedex, Scientific Information Database, Irandoc, Noormags, Magiran and Google scholar were searched to find articles published in peer-reviewed journals from August 2002 to August 2012. A qualitative appr...

The need to include the spiritual dimension when assessing clients and planning their healthcare is evident from numerous studies conducted by various disciplines. Practitioners of holistic care agree that spiritual care must be included to address fully the needs of clients. The aim of this qualitative research was to explore and document the stories of clients regarding the role healthcare pr...