Spirituality and spiritual care in nursing fundamentals textbooks

Abstract

Educators are increasingly being called on to teach nursing students the fundamentals of spiritual care. The purpose of this study was to investigate and analyze what was being taught to nursing students about spirituality and spiritual care through nursing fundamentals textbooks. Findings of this study suggest that although this body of literature provides comprehensive content about spirituality and spiritual care, there are some underlying conceptual problems. The clear demarcation between spirituality and religion creates problematic dichotomies between patients' individual and cultural selves and their cognitive and experiential selves. Defining spirituality primarily by positive emotional descriptors and cognitive capacity tends to pathologize the basic human experience of suffering and marginalize those most vulnerable in society. Spiritual care is problematic in that it is difficult to identify what constitutes a uniquely spiritual intervention, the outcomes being proposed for care are questionable, and there is an assumption that nurses' spiritual worldviews are biases in the context of care.