Analysis of Spirituality Content in Nursing Textbooks

Abstract

Although most nurses believe spiritual care is an integral component of quality, holistic nursing care, they rarely address spiritual issues and typically feel unprepared to do so. One reason for nurses’ lack of preparedness to provide spiritual interventions is that their basic education only minimally discusses spirituality and related issues. This is compounded by the problem that only sporadic reference to spiritual care is found in most nursing textbooks. This study was conducted to analyze the content related to spirituality in nursing textbooks in order to determine where spiritual care is addressed and evaluate its adequacy. A total of 50 textbooks from a wide variety of nursing specialty areas were selected from the most recent Brandon Hill list. These books were examined to assess the percentage of pages discussing spiritual issues and analyze inclusion of core content essential for nursing practice. Although there was considerable variation among the books from all specialty areas, overall, hospice/terminal care, fundamentals of nursing, health assessment/health promotion, and transcultural nursing textbooks provided the most information about spirituality and spiritual care. Textbooks focusing on professional issues, medical-surgical nursing, maternal-child health nursing, critical care nursing, and community health nursing contained the least spiritual content. Suggestions are made regarding how to integrate spiritual issues and spiritual care in all nursing textbooks that pertain directly to patient care.

Women Undergoing Breast Diagnostics: The Lived Experience of Spirituality

“…McEwen (2004) found that little nursing education centers on spirituality. Informing women that chaplains are available to them if they wish could be part of the care process.…”

Undergraduate nurse students' perspectives of spiritual care education in an Australian context

“…Despite this competency requirement, international research continues to show that nurses perceive themselves as unsure of how to implement spiritual care in practice (Burkhart and Schmidt, 2012). Their uncertainty relates to a lack of a clear understanding of what spirituality means and what spiritual care entails (McEwen, 2004;McSherry, 2007;Smyth and Allen, 2011) and poor educational preparation (Milligan, 2004;Ozbasaran et al, 2011).…”

“…Furthermore inadequate educational preparation has left RNs unclear in how to implement competent spiritual care (McEwen, 2004(McEwen, , 2005McSherry and Jamieson, 2011). As a result nurses prefer to refer spiritual care to religious workers and chaplains than provide spiritual care themselves (Ross, 1994).…”

Are Parish Nurses Prepared to Incorporate the Spiritual Dimension Into Practice?

“…Many nursing education programs prepar ing nurses for licensure only mini mally address the spiritual dimension (McEwen, 2004;Pesut, 2008). Many nursing education programs prepar ing nurses for licensure only mini mally address the spiritual dimension (McEwen, 2004;Pesut, 2008).…”

“…2006). As such, spiritual care is a major component of quality, holistic care (McEwen, 2004;Shelly & Miller, revised the specialty to reflect all faith traditions, changing the name to FCN. However, due to the lack of spiritual emphasis in many nursing education programs, many nurses infrequently address spiritual issues related to their feeling of inadequacy in spiritual care training.…”