Spiritual care in nursing: a concept analysis.

BACKGROUND: Around the world, spiritual care in nursing is a critical part of providing holistic care, but within our profession, there is a lack of certainty over the meaning of spirituality and delivery of spiritual care, including nurses thinking of spirituality as religion. METHODS: We adopted the eight-step Walker and Avant's concept analysis approach to provide a definition of the concept, searching and analysing international and national online databases. Inclusion criterion included that articles were published between 1950 and 2012 in English or Persian language. Finally, 151 articles and 7 books were included in the analysis. FINDINGS: The attributes of spiritual care are healing presence, therapeutic use of self, intuitive sense, exploration of the spiritual perspective, patient-centredness, meaning-centred therapeutic intervention and creation of a spiritually nurturing environment. Spiritual care is a subjective and dynamic concept, a unique aspect of care that integrates all the other aspects. It emerges in the context of nurses' awareness of the transcendent dimension of life and reflects a patient's reality. The provision of spiritual care leads to positive consequences such as healing for patients and promotion of spiritual awareness for nurses. IMPLICATIONS FOR NURSING AND HEALTH POLICY: The conceptual definition of spiritual care provided in this study can help clinical nurses, educators and nurse managers to develop and implement evidence-based health policies, comprehensive staff training programmes and practical quality assessment guidelines to try to ensure that all nurses are competent to include relevant spiritual care in practice. CONCLUSION: A comprehensive definition of the concept of spiritual care ensued. The findings can facilitate further development of nursing knowledge and practice in spiritual care and facilitate correction of common misconceptions about the provision of spiritual care.

Effect of music on anxiety, stress, and depression levels in patients undergoing coronary angiography.

Control of stress and anxiety and the promotion of comfort are challenges facing health practitioners involved in catheterization. The aim of this case-control study was to examine the effect of music on the levels of anxiety, stress, and depression experienced by patients undergoing coronary angiography, as measured by the 21-item Depression Anxiety Stress Scales. Differences in pre- and post-intervention scores demonstrated that there were significant decreases in mean scores of state anxiety (P = 0.006), stress (P = 0.001) and depression P = 0.02) in the intervention group, who listened to 20 minutes of relaxing music, as compared with the control group who had 20 minutes of bed rest.

The effects of neonatal choline dietary supplementation on adult spatial and configural learning and memory in rats.

The facilitative effects of pre- and early postnatal choline chloride dietary supplementation on adult rat spatial and nonspatial learning and memory were examined using a delayed match-to-place and a transverse-patterning discrimination task. Animals were exposed to the choline supplementation both prenatally (through the diet of pregnant rats) and postnatally (subcutaneous injection) for 24 days. In the first experiment, 90-day-old rats were given pairs of trials in which they first found a hidden platform in a Morris water maze in a particular location (acquisition trials), and then were required to remember that position 10 min later (test trials). Those animals given neonatal choline pretreatment found the platform on test trials significantly faster than did animals in a saline-treated control group. All animals were subsequently tested in the same paradigm following atropine sulfate injections. The atropine eliminated the difference between experimental and control animals on test trials. In a second experiment, neonatally treated choline rats performed significantly better than controls in acquiring a visual transverse patterning discrimination task previously found to be sensitive to hippocampal and/or frontal damage. The present study extends the description of long-term functional enhancement produced by perinatal choline supplementation to include the ability to use and remember visual configural associations, working spatial memory, and to relate these effects to modifications in cholinergic basal forebrain systems.