Religion, spirituality and belief: is this the business of nurses?

摘要

Many nurses pride themselves on taking a holistic approach to service users. Holism is the view that the parts of the whole are so interconnected, they cannot be understood in isolation. In nursing, this means care focused on the whole person: the biological, social, psychological and spiritual aspects of being (Royal College of Nursing (RCN),2014). Holism is a response to the limitations of biomedical approaches to healthcare, which reduce people to a set of signs and symptoms and downplay the spiritual elements of life such as faith, hope and compassion (World Health Organization (WHO), 1998). Behavioural sciences, such as psychology and sociology, are well established alongside biology in nurse education programmes, but spirituality, religion and belief, and how they relate to the nurse's role, is perhaps less clear.