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...

The notion of "spiritual capital" has been the subject of growing interest in recent years; however, the concept remains poorly defined. Based on a review of the academic literature and on interviews and focus groups conducted with leaders and volunteers of over fifteen NGOs and community groups in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, this paper proposes a preliminary conceptual framework for understan...

PURPOSE/OBJECTIVES To examine the differences among secular, traditional, and religious Israeli oncology nurses' intrinsic religiosity, extrinsic religiosity, spiritual well-being, and attitudes toward spiritual care. DESIGN A comparative, descriptive study. SAMPLE 148 Israeli Jewish nurses drawn from the membership of the Israeli Oncology Nursing Association. METHODS Nurses completed mai...

BACKGROUND Although nurses acknowledge that spiritual care is part of their role, in reality, it is performed to a lesser extent. The purpose of the present study was to explore nurses' and patients' experiences about the conditions of spiritual care and spiritual interventions in the oncology units of Tabriz. MATERIALS AND METHODS This study was conducted with a qualitative conventional cont...

Spiritual cares in nursery are those that are presented by the nurse and are related to their experiences about meaning, purpose, religion and spirit-uality. Spirituality and spiritual cares are two separated categories considering certain dimension of care. Spiritual competence in spiritual care refers to a set of skills that can be used in clinical nursery process (1). The tool used to measur...

This case report shares a nursing experience that applied Swanson's Caring Theory as part of the care regimen for a terminal lung cancer patient suffering from spiritual distress. The nursing care was provided from March 20th to April 25th, 2012. Data were collected through observation and conversation and recorded using sketches and written notes. The nurse assessed the patient's relationships...