BACKGROUND Spiritual distress is prevalent in advanced disease, but often neglected, resulting in unnecessary suffering. Evidence to inform spiritual care practices in palliative care is limited. AIM To explore spiritual care needs, experiences, preferences and research priorities in an international sample of patients with life-limiting disease and family caregivers. DESIGN Focus group stu...

AIM This study contributes to the development of a valid and reliable instrument, the spiritual care competence scale, as an instrument to assess nurses' competencies in providing spiritual care. BACKGROUND Measuring these competencies and their development is important and the construction of a reliable and valid instrument is recommended in the literature. DESIGN Survey. METHOD The part...

According to a paper published by the International Work Group on Death, Dying and Bereavement, "Each person has a spiritual dimension." That means each person has spiritual energy and spiritual needs. In facing death, a patient suffers spiritual pain and needs spiritual care. This paper describes what spirituality and spiritual pain mean. It identifies nine types of fears and anxieties about d...

In this paper, we outline a research project to investigate whether and how spiritual capital affects the economic behavior of individuals. We define spiritual capital as a set of intangible objects in the form of rules for interacting with people, nature, and spiritual beings (God, gods, buddhas, angels, evil spirits as believed to exist by individuals and in different religions) and believed ...

A contemporary orientation of the hospital experience model must encompass the clients' religious-spiritual dimension. The objective of this paper is to share a previous experience, highlighting at least five reasons hospitals should invest in this direction, and an equal number of steps required to achieve it. In the first part, the text discourses about five reasons to invest in religious-spi...

BACKGROUND Though most models of palliative care specifically include spiritual care as an essential element, secular health care organizations struggle with supporting spiritual care for people who are dying and their families. Organizations often leave responsibility for such care with individual care providers, some of whom are comfortable with this role and well supported, others who are no...

BACKGROUND Nurses have a moral obligation to ensure holistic care of patients, inclusive of the spiritual dimension. However, there seems to be a void in the teaching and learning of spiritual care in nursing curricula. Despite the South African Nursing Council being in favour of holistic nursing, there are no measures in place to ensure implementation of spiritual care, hence its practice is n...

BACKGROUND Spiritual needs are among an individual's essential needs in all places and times. With his physical and spiritual dimensions and the mutual effect of these two dimensions, human has spiritual needs as well. These needs are an intrinsic need throughout the life; therefore, they will remain as a major element of holistic nursing care. One of the greatest challenges for nurses is to sa...

This article examines the reception of the early modern hospital among the indigenous people of the Andes under Spanish colonial rule. During the period covered by this study (sixteenth to mid-eighteenth centuries), the hospital was conceived primarily as a manifestation of the sovereign’s paternalistic concern for his subjects’ spiritual well being. Hospitals in the Spanish American colonies w...

BACKGROUND As professional spiritual care (chaplaincy) is introduced to new cultures worldwide, it bears examining which elements of screening and care are universal and, for those elements showing cultural difference, to study them in each culture. No quantitative spiritual care patient study had previously been done in Israel. Our objectives were twofold: 1) to examine who wants spiritual car...