Spiritual Suffering in Acute Care Pain Management: A Higher Power Session

Abstract

Background

Most bedside nurses are not aware of the role of hospital chaplains in pain management. This includes the belief that nurses often view chaplains as offering care based on strict religious doctrines. Most nurses view spiritual care to be only associated with emotional well-being. Our recent study described the concept of spiritual suffering and how hospital chaplains provide spiritual interventions. This collaboration may augment pain management in acute care, to improve patient outcomes.

Purpose

This power session describes the implications of nursing around spiritual suffering and the collaboration of nurses and chaplains.

Methods

A pain and spirituality study involving hospital chaplains revealed clinical applications that will be presented. A detailed summary of the data and concepts discovered in this small qualitative study informs new insight into the individual pain experience.

Conclusions

Hospital chaplains’ approach to care is not pastoral or preaching, but as a spiritual counselor and assess spiritual suffering through qualitative assessment. Nurses use well-defined quantitative assessments to describe pain intensity. The collaboration between the two disciplines creates a distinct overlapping of the domains that allows for objectively measured results. These results will be compared to an existential approach to pain assessment. This creates a new theoretical approach to explaining the pain experience.

Implications

Clinical practice implications include collaboration between nurses and chaplains to augment pain management and provide comprehensive spiritual care. Research may include a theoretical approach that includes spirituality and existentialism in the interpretation of the pain experience.