Nursing Area I Would like to Change

 Nursing Area I Would like to Change

Medical interventions, including nursing practice, ought to be wholesome and not focus only on the physical well-being of the patient but also other aspects of their being. The aspect of nursing that I would like to change is the way nurses take care of patients’ spiritual needs. My PICOT question is, can short causes improve patient spiritual care by nurses in the future?

Recent studies have revealed that incorporating the spiritual dimension in health care can help patients face the disease more confidently than when treatment focuses only on the physical aspect of sickness. A study by Ratshikana-Moloko et al. (2020) showed that cancer patients who received spiritual care suffered less pain (2.82± 1.23 vs. 1.93± 1.69) and consequently used less morphine. Moreover, at least 88% of patients admitted in hospitals consider religion important to them (O’Brien, 2017). In their time of need, most people including those who previously are generally unspiritual turn to religion as source of comfort and strength. Out of the total number of survived, Cullen (2016), found out that close to 64% of patients expected the nurses taking care of them to be empathetic towards their condition and at least offer them some kind of moral support. Among the responses the patients gave was the desire for the nurses listen to their spiritual, assist them with religious practices or arrange for visit by a spiritual leader.

Patients who do not access some kind of spiritual support are more likely to become stressed and may even tend towards depression. For example, O’Brien (2017) observes that about 88 % of terminally and critically ill patients suffer some sought of spiritual struggle. Furthermore, people suffering from cancer are most affected by the absence of religious support (Ratshikana-Moloko et al., 2020). Such patients have difficulties completing their treatment and relate poorly with health care providers. Ratshikana-Moloko et al. (2020) study indicated that 81.9% of the nurses surveyed felt that at least 33.7%% of the patients that succumbed could have survived for longer if they had been receiving spiritual help.

While this is the case, there are fewer nurses supporting their patients spiritually. For instance, the study by Ratshikana-Moloko et al. 2020) revealed that 74% of nurses interviewed desired to offer spiritual care to their clients. However, from the same study, 40% of the nurses reported that they cared for the spiritual needs of to patients less often than they would have wanted. These statistics show that the desire to provide palliative care among nurses does not necessarily translate into provision of this kind of care to patients.

Research has also identified some of the impediments nurses face in an attempt to respond to the spiritual needs of their clients. The main hindrance is lack of training in this area. For example, Özveren & Kırca (2019) found out that 55.7% of nursing students in South Korean training center were oblivious of spiritual care while 81.4% had no information about it. O’Brien (2017) notes that majority of the nurses would be willing to support their clients spiritually if they received a reasonable adequate training in this respect. Therefore, lack of proper education and sensitization in this field significantly hinders nurses’ efforts to offer spiritual care.

As such, I suggest that hospitals partner with religious organizations to train their nursing staff on the essential elements of spiritual care in nursing. The hospitals can organize for workshops and short curses that the staff can undertake to boost their skills and effectiveness in this area. This is in line with the findings of Özveren & Kırca (2019) would found out that training nurses has a significant (p<0.05) in inspiring nurses to care for the spiritual needs of their patients. Furthermore, health care centers can organize for hospital visits by religious groups and encourage the members if the nursing fraternity to participate in the exercise. This way, they would learn firsthand on how to go about this matter on their own. Besides, the visits could help establish a nurses’ fellowship that would help them share their experiences and seek divine help to boost their initiative.

References

O’brien, M. E. (2017). Spirituality in nursing. Jones & Bartlett Learning.

Özveren, H., & Kırca, K. (2019). Influence of Palliative Care Training on Last-Year Nursing Department Students’ Perception on Regarding Spirituality and Spiritual Care: A Single-Group Pretest–Posttest Intervention Study. Journal of religion and health, 58(3), 860-869.

Ratshikana-Moloko, M., Ayeni, O., Tsitsi, J. M., Wong, M. L., Jacobson, J. S., Neugut, A. I., … & Mapanga, W. (2020). Spiritual care, pain reduction and preferred place of death among advanced cancer patients in Soweto, South Africa. Journal of Pain and Symptom Management.