The Impact of Spirituality on the Provision of Healthcare.
Spirituality has an immense impact on healthcare delivery and consumption of services aimed at improving the well-being of a state’s citizenry. Spirituality is an inextricable part of someone’s life and a crucial factor that allows human-kind to overcome various life challenges. It is the way human beings find comfort, hope, meaning and inner peace in life. Both spirituality and religious beliefs are reckoned to be of benefit to mental and physical health. Mostly, spirituality is cultivated through religion, but some get through it through interaction with nature, music, and arts. In light of this essay, the ways in which spirituality influences the delivery of healthcare to the patient is explored.
Spirituality is undoubtedly influencing how healthcare practitioners treat patients. First, spirituality has been associated with better coping with illness, and life stresses like pain. Spiritual caregivers have a positive outlook on every health concerns and hence tend to “breathe life” into patients through encouragements, and this leads to a better quality of patients’ life (Büssing et al., 2014). Understanding the role of spirituality in a patient’s life is the first step to the delivery of quality health services. It helps the caregiver understand the patients more and establish a better way to deliver the required services.
Secondly, some spiritual practices have been associated with positive health outcomes. Research on how transcendental meditation impact well-being of human-beings has stood out. The study depicts that a ten to twenty-minute meditation twice per day reduces heart rate, lowers metabolism, slows the respiratory rate and slows the brain waves too. This practice, over time, has proven to be of benefits to patients suffering from chronic pain, anxiety, insomnia, stress and depression (Westerlund, 2016). Indeed, understanding the patients’ spirituality is an integral part of holistic healthcare.
Healthcare givers should endeavour to understand the spirituality of their patients to establish better ways to help them cope. It is prudent that healthcare providers remain non-judgmental on patients’ spirituality and learn to integrate the spiritual aspect in the delivery of healthcare services.