Back in 1996, Peter Nolan and Paul Crawford of the University of Birmingham (UK) issued an interesting article in the Journal of Advanced Nursing entitled: “Towards a rhetoric of spirituality in mental health care“.
Abstract (emphases mine):
The spiritual dimension of care is frequently alluded to in the nursing literature, but rarely examined in terms of what it means in practice or how it might be taught to students entering the profession. Some of those most in need of spiritual care are people suffering from mental illness or psychological distress. The aim of this paper is to explore the different meanings of spirituality and to suggest ways in which the spiritual care of clients can be implemented. It further recommends which aspects of spirituality could usefully be included in nursing curricula. The paper concludes by alerting nurses to the causes and manifestations of spiritual apathy in contemporary health care and calls for a rhetoric that will counter the jargon of cost analysis which currently prevails in the health services.
Obviously, this was written more the 10-years ago, but it remains very relevant. My own perspective is that whilst spirituality now features on the curriculum of many nursing programmes, little is done to help bridge the theory-practice gap in this area. Increasingly, “spirituality” and “religion” are equated, and – alarmingly – associated with post-mortem care planning (arranging for appropriate rituals to be observed, etc). Spirituality has become associated with ritual and is regarded as the domain of the chaplaincy department – who are regarded as professional spiritual carers.
Spiritual care has been compartmentalised in the same way that surgical intervention has. Nursing care plans often fail to realise that nurses cannot avoid implementing “spiritual care” – the interaction of two individuals is one rooted in a common, spiritual, experience of personhood. Student nurses, who endeavour to become skilled in caring for the human spirit, must learn a “way of being” with patients – an approach to spending time with, valuing and dignifying the human persons that are commended to their care. Christian theology contributes to this by understanding humanity in the Imago Dei, and by acknowleding a relational ontological approach to ethics.
As this article emphasises, therefore, spirituality is the necessary and universal responsibility of all healthcare practitioners. The responsibility for spiritual education of nurses falls both in the theoretical confines of the university and in the practical setting of the ward. Nursing theology and spirituality is cut at the coal-face of the nurse-client relationship. Nursing theology provides not a cognitive-proposition focussed set of data, but a grammatical framework which serves to regulate and add meaning to our common experience of humanity. Nurses are therefore tasked to become experts in human spirituality, even if their primary duty is not that of the pastor – to facilitate the encounter between man and God.
