Paper: Beyond Palliative: The Role of Spiritual Care, a Literature Review (20th International Nursing Research Congress Focusing on Evidence-Based Practice)

Tuesday, 14 July 2009: 1:45 PM

Lay Hwa Tiew, MSc
Clinical Standards & Improvement, Office of Clinical Governance, Tan Tock Seng Hospital / National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

Learning Objective 1: The learner will be able to discuss the varied views that underpins spirituality.

Learning Objective 2: The learner will be able to discuss and outline the approach required to provide spiritual care to end of life patients.

Purpose: The concept of palliative care held by most clinicians traditionally concentrate on alleviating symptoms. However, the increasing focus is now on providing quality of life. The World Health Organisation’s mandate to adopt "an approach that improves the quality of life of patients ….facing… life-threatening illness." reiterates the need of our pre-existent commitment of duty to “provide holistic care”, which is meeting the physical, emotional, social, economic and spiritual needs of patients .
This paper intends to clarify the concept and role of spirituality in care in providing quality of life and what is needed to support nurses’ role in providing spiritual need.

Methods: The data bases “CINAHL”, “PubMed” and “Medline” were searched from 1990 to 2007 using the search terms, “spirituality”, “healthcare outcomes” and “spiritual care”. A total of about 40 key papers were obtained following the scrutiny of the abstracts.

Results: Findings revealed that spirituality is usually confused with religiosity. Nurses have always been delegated the task of addressing and coordinating this. However, studies and surveys iterated that this requires a multidisciplinary involvement. Further, most research reported that nurses felt inadequately prepared educationally to address the spiritual concerns of their patients. Many other hindering factors cited were ethical issues, environment, time constraints, individual’s cultural / religious beliefs etc.

Conclusion: It is clear from the literature reviewed that the constructs of spirituality and religiosity were confused. Most nurses are also not ready to address patients’ spiritual needs. The author feels that if patients’ spiritual dimension needs to be addressed, the issue of nursing education and the healthcare environment need to be addressed and assessed in practice.

See more of: Palliative Care Issues
See more of: Evidence-Based Practice Sessions – Oral Paper & Posters