Spirituality Goes Beyond Religiosity: A Much Needed Practice in Nursing

How often do you consider providing spiritual care to your patients? Many nurses shy away from this aspect of patient care citing feeling uncomfortable about broaching the topic with patients. Others provide the rationale of not wanting to impose their beliefs onto their patients or they imply the patient may be offended if asked how best to meet his or her spiritual needs. Frequently, nurses tout the necessity of providing holistic care to patients but forget or purposely overlook the need to address a patient’s spiritual needs. Isn’t spiritual care a vital component of health care? The current biomedical definition of health is the absence of illness or disease, which has a negative slant. If nurses are to go beyond this limited view of health, the profession must look to meet the patient’s spiritual needs by helping them obtain tranquil abiding. One may ask how does one operationalize a state of tranquil abiding? Moberg (1979) offers an operational definition of spiritual well-being as the