Spiritual Development of Nursing Students: Developing Competence to Provide Spiritual Care to Patients at the End of Life

Abstract

<h4>ABSTRACT</h4> <P>Nurses spend more time with their patients than do other health care workers. Therefore, the spiritual needs of patients must be recognized as a domain of nursing care. Holism cannot exist without consideration of the spiritual aspects that create individuality and give meaning to people’s lives. The purpose of this article is to provide nursing faculty with tools that may be used to develop spiritually knowledgeable nursing students who can overcome barriers to providing spiritual care to end-of-life patients. Our students were required to complete care maps to ensure they are prepared for patient care at the end of life. In this article, we present tools that faculty and students may use to complete the spiritual concept in care mapping. The literature on spirituality is reviewed, use of care mapping in nursing curricula is described, and our teaching approach to develop nursing students who are skilled at providing spiritual care is explained. Three case studies and care maps created by former students are also presented to demonstrate examples of spiritual competence. </P> <h4>AUTHORS</h4> <P>Received: January 14, 2004</P> <P>Accepted: April 1, 2005</P> <P>Ms. Mitchell is Assistant Professor and Dr. Manfrin-Ledet is Associate Professor, Nicholls State University, Department of Nursing, Thibodaux, and Dr. Bennett is Associate Professor, Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center, New Orleans, Louisiana.</P> <P>Address correspondence to Denise L. Mitchell, MN, APRN, Assistant Professor, Nicholls State University, Department of Nursing, PO Box 2143, Thibodaux, LA 70310; e-mail: <a href="mailto:denise.mitchell@nicholls.edu">denise.mitchell@nicholls.edu</a>.</P>

How undergraduate nursing students learn to care for patients spiritually in clinical studies - a review of literature

“…If the abstracts confirmed that the article should be included, the full article was retrieved and read for evaluation. In the final decision about which articles to review, two articles that were weak in methodology were included (Mitchell et al 2006, Rankin & Delashmutt 2006 because they gave a rich description of how students were followed up in clinical studies. In total, 10 articles were reviewed (see Figure 1 for details regarding the process of retrieving the articles).…”

“…The selection process for articles. and situations (Catanzaro & McMullen 2001, Mitchell et al 2006, Rankin & Delashmutt 2006, Hoffert et al 2007). Meyer (2003) calls it entering the journey of discovery with patients.…”

“…Others also underline the importance of students learning in real-life situations (Mitchell et al 2006, Salmon et al 2010 where students and mentors are faced with 'I-do-not-know-what-to-do' (Giske & Cone 2012) and 'unready-to-hand' situations (Paton 2005). Hallett (1997) writes that students have to get experiences in practice before they can fully understand, and that only practice permits the acquisition of confidence.…”

Opening up to learning spiritual care of patients: a grounded theory study of nursing students

“…The literature also indicated that one focus of debate regarding spiritual care in nursing education has been on teaching content and methods (Stoll 1979, Catanzaro & McMullen 2001, van Leeuwen & Cusveller 2004, Mitchell et al 2006, McSherry et al 2008 as well as the organising of curricula (Narayanasamy 1999, Highfield et al 2000, Lemmer 2002, Ross 2006. Recently, research in many areas of spiritual care has increased, but there is very limited work from the student perspective on learning to provide spiritual care (Hoffert et al 2007, Wallace et al 2008, an area that needs further research.…”

Teaching spiritual care – a grounded theory study among undergraduate nursing educators

“…What to teach about the spiritual domain, how to facilitate students to recognise spiritual cues and to learn spiritual assessment and care giving strategies, and how to assess student learning outcomes remain a concern to nursing educators (Narayanasamy 1999b, Lemmer 2002, Pesut 2003, Callister et al 2004, Mitchell et al 2006, Hickey et al 2008. With the increased focus on spirituality, nurse educators must teach the art as well as science of spiritual care (McSherry & Ross 2010).…”