Healthcare literature suggests that many nurses fail to address patients' spiritual needs and/or identify signs of spiritual distress. A study was conducted to explore whether nurses in a medical center possessed the knowledge to assess patients' spirituality and design and implement a plan of spiritual care. The Spiritual Care Competence Scale was used to assess competence in spiritual care as...

This article introduces a new qualitative spiritual assessment instrument. It reviews existing qualitative assessment tools and presents a new multidimensional spiritual assessment framework. The instrument consists of two components: a spiritual history in which consumers relate their spiritual life story in a manner analogous to a family history and an interpretive framework to assist practit...

This article addressed the following questions: How are spirituality, spiritual need, and spiritual care in aged care defined? What constitutes spiritual care for older people in aged care? From an organisational perspective, what are barriers and enablers to providing spiritual care? Spirituality and spiritual care were defined in a variety of ways in the literature. The literature endorsed nu...

Native American culture in many parts of California is preserved in fragmentary oral and conventional written histories, but also in sometimes dramatic petroglyphs and pictographs throughout the state. The symbolism of these images has been interpreted to reflect the natural environment, in particular issues related to rain. Although there is little doubt that rain was of paramount concern to n...

OBJECTIVE Distinguishing the unique contributions and roles of chaplains as members of healthcare teams requires the fundamental step of articulating and critically evaluating conceptual models that guide practice. However, there is a paucity of well-described spiritual assessment models. Even fewer of the extant models prescribe interventions and describe desired outcomes corresponding to spir...

Understandings of the relationship between space, culture and belief are formative in the experience of seeking healing. This paper examines the relationship between place, healing and spirituality in the context of interdisciplinary perspectives (particularly those of the medical humanities) on healing and well-being. The paper examines places of spiritual significance and their relationship t...

PURPOSE Spirituality encompasses a wide range of meanings between holistic wellbeing and mysticism. We explored advanced cancer patients' spiritual experiences of transcendence. METHODS A total of 251 patients with advanced cancer were included and observed (participant observation) over 12 months by a psycho-oncologist/music-therapist. She recorded and documented patients' spontaneously expr...

Background: Infertility is an acute life crisis which may last for an indeterminate length of time. In a holistic approach to infertile women’s care, which is believed to assist patients cope better with their experiences, all aspects of holistic care including religious and spiritual needs of individuals should be considered. A literature review revealed that religious and spiritual dimensions...

The majority of patients treated for cancer will have pain at some point in their journey. Suffering and death are common events in cancer patients. Palliative care has been very successful in reducing the discomfort caused by physical pain, but does not have the means to address the questions related to the meaning of suffering and death. The soothing of physical pain has helped highlighting o...