Spiritual Care for Patients and Their Families in the Intensive Care Unit

Abstract

To date, most of the literature in Taiwan on clinical spiritual care has focused either on improving the spiritual well-being of patients or on developing assessment tools suitable for use with end-stage cancer patients. Few articles have discussed spiritual care in the context of intensive care unit (ICU) patients and their family members. When ICU patients face life-threatening and complex physiological problems, spiritual care plays an important role in disease recovery and adaptation and impacts the satisfaction and medical decision-making of critical patients and their family members. This article describes the synergy model and spiritual care guidelines for ICU patients and their families. Furthermore, this article supplements two recent interventional studies that targeted ICU patients in intensive care unit with direct and easily understood instructions for self-implementation of the two dimensions, vertical and horizontal, of spiritual well-being. The author hopes to provide a practical reference for implementing spiritual care with ICU patients and their families in clinical practice.