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...

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...

PURPOSE/OBJECTIVES To understand how hospital inpatients express their spirituality and to investigate the impact of hospice environment on this expression. RESEARCH APPROACH Qualitative. SETTING Two metropolitan hospice centers in southern Australia. PARTICIPANTS 12 inpatients (7 males, 5 females) who were residents for at least four days. METHODOLOGIC APPROACH Influenced by Heidegger'...

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...

A growing body of research documents the harmful effects of religious or spiritual struggle among patients with a wide variety of diagnoses. We developed a brief screening protocol for use in identifying patients who may be experiencing religious/spiritual struggle, as well as patients who would like a visit from a chaplain. We describe the results of a pilot study in which non-chaplain healthc...