Health Promotion of Nurses: The Case of Spirituality

Koren, Mary Elaine

Saturday, 29 October 2011

Mary Elaine Koren, RN, PhD
School of Nursing, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL
Christina Papadimitriou, PhD
School of Nursing and Health Studies, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL

Learning Objective 1: Discuss the need for nurse's spiritual well-being.

Learning Objective 2: List potential spiritual well-being/self-care activities for the global nursing workforce that in turn will sustain the health of the world population.

Nurses’ work is generally understood to be inherently spiritual (Wright, 2002) not only because they address the spiritual needs of patients, but also because they experience their work as meaningful and purposive. Addressing the spiritual needs of nurses is important for their general well-being. Few studies address these needs via interventions (Bay et al. 2010), however there is little evidence supporting their effectiveness. More research is needed that investigates the actual spiritual needs of nurses, rather than assume them. The purpose of this study was to understand the spiritual needs of staff nurses in an effort to design and test intervention strategies in the future.

Eleven staff nurses, from various medical-surgical units from one hospital, participated in two separate focus groups. In this qualitative study, two major themes emerged from the data: ‘caring for the patient’ and ‘caring for one self’. In ‘caring for oneself’, participants identified spirituality as a major component of their general well-being and ability to do their work well. Participants also valued being there for patients, ‘I think what is meaningful is to make someone’s life comfortable.’ And participants discussed the value of coworkers, ‘And having support of the manager and staff.’ Spiritual well-being was talked about as both a personal and an institutional matter: personal in that participants spoke about remembering to take time for themselves after work hours (such as massage or exercise); and institutional in that participants suggested obtaining more support from supervisors, clergy, other colleagues and social (on line) networks.

Previous research suggests that nurses practice few health promoting activities (Richards et al. 2006). This study reminds us that the spiritual well-being of nurses should be part of the health promotion efforts of the global community of nurses.

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