"Putting Feet to What We Pray About": The Experience of Caring by Faith-Based Care Team Members

This presentation is part of : Issues in Palliative Care

Mona Shattell, PhD, RN, School of Nursing, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL, USA and Cathy Hasty, BSN, MDiv, ThM, RN, LPC, BCC, Department of Pastoral Care and Education, Carolinas Healthcare System, Charlotte, NC, USA.

Population, Sample, Setting: Participants included 19 individual care team members who served for one or more years on a faith-based care team providing in-home support for families with special needs (caregivers and care recipients with chronic disease or terminal illness).

Methods: Nondirective, in-depth phenomenological interviews were conducted, transcribed verbatim, and analyzed for themes.

Findings: Analysis of the interview texts resulted in the following three themes: “putting feet to what we pray about,” “the benefits have far outweighed anything I have done” and “it could be me.” Conclusions: Participants were drawn to the care team project because of personal experiences with suffering, a history of caring for family/friends/significant others, and the team context. Participants expressed a strong reciprocity in their experience, for example, “It’s a mutual thing but I think I’ve gotten a lot out of it.” The experience of being on a care team raised questions for participants such as, “what if it was me?” In some cases the care giving experience was a lesson on survival, “you don’t just lie down and die, you get back up.”

Implications: The findings from this study contribute to the limited body of knowledge concerning experiences of participants on faith-based care teams. This knowledge validates information from other sources about the benefits of altruistic experiences and contributes new insights to the value of faith-based care teams for caregivers and their chronically ill family members. Understanding care team members’ experiences can assist program planners to improve the care that the team members provide, to offer targeted education, and to provide specific support to team members in order to ensure satisfaction with their care team experiences.

Learning Objective #1: Describe the care team members’ experiences of caring on a faith-based care team
Learning Objective #2: Discuss implications for nursing practice