Nursing researchers and practitioners started to use both quantitative and qualitative research on nursing since World War II. The events of World War II involved the most significant death and injury counts in the world’s history. Nurses had the urgent need to support spiritual assessment and spiritual care in health care centers with nursing models because of the increase in psychological, spiritual and physical health issues that affected people who would stream in large numbers to health care tents and centers. Most modern nursing programs who apply the finding from social and psychological domains of past scholars, have the gratitude focus.
Medical practitioners and scholars incorporate the concept of thankfulness in spiritual nursing theories as guidance to treat patients (Taylor, 2001). Modern nurses have the role to multitask when they treat patients and at the same time engage with the spiritual and innate aspect of the patients’ thankful nature. Spirituality is an aspect in everyone and therefore as nurses tender to the sick, they as well have the role to take care of spirit.
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The tools for research include the Spiritual Assessment Tool that measures thankfulness as a concept of spiritual well-being. Spirituality is related to religion. Religion can negatively or positively affect the nursing practice. If a nurse has belief systems that conflict with the personal beliefs of the patient the aspect of thankfulness can be hard to instill A nurse can require patients to be thankful for what God or a Supreme Being has blessed them with while patient may believe in the practice of euthanasia to end suffering. The health care practitioners get spiritual dilemmas in such cases. An atheist can dismiss the aspect of thankfulness to a “god’ that they do not believe in. in faith-based health care institutions, people who share a different belief system may keep away to avoid spiritual conflict. In Catholic-based systems, the priest recites a prayer to thank God for the life that the person’s lived through the Sacrament of Death.
Another toll that can used in research, is the measurement of the nurse to nurse and nurse to patient relationship. Research has shown that gratitude requires in-depth self-evaluation and quiet contemplation. Most nurses that are also nuns find this more convenient than contemporary nurses or nurses of a different denomination. Policies in healthcare centers that practice the concept of thankfulness put their entry level nurses through spiritual training that aligns with the spiritual practice. The hospitals, clinics, and other centers have booklets that elaborate more on this aspect.
Literature, from the World War II on modern nursing, has addressed the issue on life uncertainty by patients and nurses, pain control, skill acquisition and chronic sadness. Spirituality opens up the reference to spiritual books that offer guidance to all theses frameworks that cannot be measured in a quantitative way. The Anointing of the Sick by Catholic priest reminds patience of the pain that Jesus suffered to unite God with human beings and therefore the patient should be grateful that through Jesus’ suffering God will raise them from the bed of sickness. The patients’ faith is therefore restored (O’Brien, 2003).
Spiritual well-being encompasses the range of middle-range theories that focus on the spiritual well-being of patients who experience long chronic diseases. It is the freewill of the patient to lament on the suffering but it is important for the nurse to deeply understand how to train a dying patient to be grateful. Patients are usually in a state of inquiry on the reasons that they undergo pain while most people are healthy. The nurse can show the patient that they should appreciate how the family and the health centre take care of them and how their chance of survival is still hopeful.
Spiritual awareness enables a patient to deal with pain or the preempted knowledge on the possibility of death due to untreatable illness. It is the nurses’ duty to encourage a patient and enable them to be grateful for the life that they lived. Nuse researches who work with patients learn how to assess a patient’s spiritual need and therefore pass the knowledge to all medical practitioners. Person-based research enables quick recovery. The mind is the most powerful force in times of illness. When a patient keeps faith that they shall heal fast, they become thankful for all the events in their life and hence recover at a faster rate than those patients that close off their minds to spiritual senses. Empirical findings state that there is a correlation between the concept of thankfulness in a patient’s spiritual well-being with an improved quality of life.
The gap between the nursing research is the lack of focus on other patients in non-faith-based settings. This tool will enable the researcher to compare and contrast the different patients with the same chronic conditions and evaluate if spiritual well-being significantly applies to the nursing practice. Such research will potentially strengthen the spiritual role in nursing and therefore expand the dimensions.
References
O’Brien, M. E. (2003). Parish Nursing: Healthcare ministry within the church . Sudbury, MA: Jones and Bartlett.
Taylor, E. (2001). Spiritual Care: Nursing Theory, Research, and Practice . California: Pearson.
