Facing Existential Realities: Exploring Barriers and Challenges to Spiritual Nursing Care

Abstract

Although nurses of the past and present recognize the importance of spiritual care to health and healing, in practice and education, spiritual care dwells on the periphery of the profession. The purpose of this study was to gain a better understanding of the reasons behind this contradiction. Using the phenomenological approach, open-ended interviews were conducted with 29 individuals, including oncology nurses, patients and their families, chaplains, and hospital administrators. Their accounts reveal examples of how attitudes, beliefs, and practices of the larger organizational culture can shape the everyday lived experience of bedside nursing. Specifically, these influences tend to create a lived space that is uncaring, and a lived time that is "too tight." Moreover, lived body is experienced as an object for technical intervention, and lived other is experienced from a distance rather than "up close and personal." It was argued that, together, these existential experiences of lived time, space, body, and other create formidable barriers to spiritual nursing care.