Similarities and Differences in Spirituality

Adults of Different Health Conditions.

Spirituality is an intimate relationship between self and a higher power. Essentially, people find the meaning of life through a connection between them and the higher power. Other individuals define their spiritual familiarities as an inner sense of interconnectedness and embellishment.  The spiritual breadth is an important issue to the human involvement of giving or receiving care and especially in situations of chronic cardiac conditions. The results of this study contribute to the construction of care for people whose situation requires them to modify lifestyle to improve their prognosis, and suggest exploring the relationship between spiritual beings. Spirituality is key in the nursing sector as it aids patients to recuperate. This paper seeks to explore the similarities and differences in devoutness between two elderly people. One is sixty-five years old whose diagnosis is a chronic cardiac illness while the other is an eighty five year old healthy person. Keywords: Spirituality, Health, Chronic Cardiac Illness

Nurses face various different challenges especially when it boils down to helping patients accept their predicament and find meaning in the midst of their sorrow, grief and chronic disease. Spirituality addresses the adjustment of lifestyle to improve the demand of a fused focus to accept the complete human organism and its close relationship with the surroundings in which they live in. In that sense, the conceptual model of Margaret Newman is a useful tool to work the spiritual dimension of care guide (Puchalski & Christina, 2006). One way to address the spiritual breadth of care may be through the perception of spiritual well-being seen as a sense of accord with God, a being or superior forte, with others, with the environment and with self as demonstrated by Puchalski (2006). The gauge of spiritual well-being of Ellison proves to be a useful tool for measuring the spiritual welfare of people; it is suitable at Communal level and has great affinity with the conceptual model of health as expanding consciousness.

The Spirituality level of an eighty-five year-old person who is healthy is high unlike the sixty-eight year-old person with chronic cardiac condition who has minimal involvement in the existential dimension of spirituality. The level of spiritual security that we find in the peer group people apparently in good physical shape is high, which mostly results to growth that is more spiritual. Huguelet & Koenig, (2009) state that when comparing the levels of spirituality breadth of the two different age groups, it is evident that there is a significant difference between them, hence a greater overall spiritual well-being and maturity in thought.

The aspect of Care experience of human health must consider the spiritual dimension as an abundant factor; this can mean as a factor of personal growth, an aspect of perfection that brings people closer to motivate many necessary changes in one’s lifestyle or have particular behaviours that can affect one’s health responses. Individuals who are sick mostly feel unconnected with their spiritual being; most of them fail to understand why they have to undergo such experiences.  Due to these emotions, as described by (Puchalski & Christina, 2006), spiritual responses are now gaining so much ground in various hospitals.

David Tereshchuk, a news correspondent, interviewed the director of the health institution and the hospital chaplain. This is in line with the Religion and Ethics Newsweekly.   Dr. Christina Puchalski, initiator and executive of George Washington University Medical School’s Institute for Spirituality and Health, describes the involvement of spirituality to patients as a silent revolution to transform health care. There is an address of every patient’s spiritual needs as they recuperate in hospitals.  Mt. Sinai Hospital has put in place divine enhancement programs that will look at the needs of patients despite it being initially a Jewish hospital. There was the setup of chaplain trainees in the hospital, which included Rabbis, Muslim trainees, and the Catholic priest. This ensures that there is an all-inclusive plan to accommodate each patient’s needs and further emotional care and support during their recuperation process (Tereshchuk, D. 2016).

Reverend Richard Bauer, the Catholic Church Chaplain states that it is their responsibility as a holy institution to be present to the patients and listen to their needs ad advise them on how to handle their situations. Chaplains are very important considering health care institution’s need to address transcendent matters of patients (Tereshchuk, D. 2016). When one is sick, he or she usually faces many spiritual struggles. Though some patients have no religious affiliations to any church, the chaplain ought to devise other means of calming or rather lulling the patient. They ought to be diverse and know how to deal with different patients in the facility having major considerations to their beliefs, norms and values. In order to achieve tremendous patient care, health institutions need to practice outstanding spiritual care.

            Richmond, L. (2012) suggests that immediately aging strikes, each individual takes differently. Some become shocked and see death calling unto them. These makes some accept the bitter reality and reform and make amends with their Deity. Others look in the mirror and despise what they see hence become sad, grumpy and consequently develop bad eating habits. When Lewis got into a comma that no doctor thought, he would recover. It took him a long time to recover and during this process, he reviewed his spirituality and the onset of aging.  Getting old as spiritual process reviews the process as the window into the spiritual path. These individuals pay close attention to their surroundings through prayer, meditation, or even inquiry. The ability to accomplish one’s life purpose and meaning, helping people in ways that are out of the ordinary, all these entail aging in a spiritual practice (Richmond, L. 2012). Individuals above the age of fifty-five years who undergo non-compulsory heart surgery have less indulgence in social niches hence lack comfort or strength to have any spiritual indulgence unlike a healthy eighty-five year old who has focus that is more spiritual.

            As much as there are notable differences between the two individuals, spiritual similarities also exist. Cobb, Puchalski & Rumbold, (2012), suggest that spirituality can enhance the social wellbeing of both the sixty eight year old patient diagnosed with a chronic disease and the eighty five year old healthy person. For example, it promotes healthy eating habits, following proper food diets, social contentedness and shunning risky social behaviours such as drinking alcoholic beverages, and smoking. Spirituality mainly promotes compliancy with treatment and regular medical check-ups whether sick or not.

            We can say that spirituality improves the social support system of an individual irrespective of their health condition. The individuals have similar everyday spiritual familiarities, conceptual component of eminence of life, and bleak symptoms amid the two. The exploration of significance in life within the present life experience, guilt over preceding lifestyles and behaviours, reclamation of the sanguinity, and hope for the future is in both aged individuals. Constructive Spirituality matures an internalised relationship with the supreme and sacred world irrespective of one’s ethnical culture, race, age or class.

            Spirituality maintains the significance and meaningfulness of life between the sixty-five years old chronic diagnosed patient and the healthy eighty-five year old. As it is most probable, they are both likely to pass away, spirituality enables these individuals to be more receptive in facing such inevitable losses. This results to increment of self-belief, hope, joy, peace and harmony within their existing environment. Families affected, with time, come to accept the predicament they are facing and come up with appropriate measures and means that will make the elderly have a peaceful rest. Showing them love, holding family activities and ensure them that they are not alone makes them feel loved and appreciated hence be comfortable with their aging process. Close intimate relationships with the elderly makes one understand what they are really going through hence develop proper means of how to relate with them.

            In conclusion, most persons tend to have a spiritual life irrespective of their age, physical health and spiritual health. Spirituality plays a big role amongst the aged individuals. Spirituality utmost improves and enhances the social well-being of an individual and nurses can use it as a coping mechanism for chronic disease diagnosed patients.  From the above, we can conclude that there are both similarities and disparities in spirituality between the eighty five year old healthy individual and the sixty eight year old chronic patient. We can say that the diagnosed individual tends to seek more spiritual comfort than the former.

 An enhanced understanding in a patient’s spirituality need can help them cope and recuperate at a quicker rate thus progress their health results. Both the two said individuals accrue the same benefits in spiritual enhancement. Thus, regardless of one’s physical condition, it is important for the elderly to have a sense of self-belief through spirituality. According to Potter, et al, (2016), training all medical professionals in monitoring and evaluating a patient’s spirituality should be paramount during training programs and should be included in the curriculum for nursing schools.

References

Puchalski, Christina M. (2006) Baylor University Medical Center. Proceedings 14.4

Puchalski, C. M. (2006). A time for listening and caring: Spirituality and the care of the chronically ill and dying. New York [u.a.: Oxford Univ. Press.

Huguelet, P., & Koenig, H. G. (2009). Religion and spirituality in psychiatry. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Cobb, M. R., Puchalski, C. M., &Rumbold, B. D. (2012). Oxford textbook of spirituality in healthcare. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Potter, P. A., Perry, A. G., Stockert, P., & Hall, A. (2016). Fundamentals of Nursing.

Richmond, L. (2012). Aging as a spiritual practice: A contemplative guide to growing older and wiser.

Tereshchuk, D. (2016, September 16). Spiritual Healthcare. Retrieved from http://www.pbs.org