Spiritual nursing care has been widely utilized for several years because of its positive impacts on a patient’s stress responses, spiritual health, and physical and mental well-being. Professional nurses use spiritual healthcare in conjunction with other holistic and pharmaceutical medications to improve the patient’s clinical outcome. There is no actual definition of spirituality, but it mainly deals with a person’s beliefs and perspective of a higher being. Many nurses have challenges implementing and integrating spiritual healthcare practices for several reasons. Therefore, several tools have been developed and tested to aid nurses in improving their spiritual healthcare service provision within a clinical setting.
The first and the best spiritual evaluation tool is the FICA Spiritual History Tool, developed in 1996 by Puchalsky. The device was designed with primary care workers like nurses to guide physicians in integrating open-ended questions regarding spirituality. According to the tool, older individuals often require developing means of dealing with severe and chronic illnesses, and often people, especially older individuals, turn to religion to easily cope with their conditions. The FICA tool comprises four domains: faith, beliefs, spiritual significance, and the influence of a belief system (Robert et al., 2019).
The second spirituality evaluation tool is the HOPE questions. The HOPE questions are designed to help nurses ask about a patient’s source of hope and whether they originate from a particular religion. The HOPE questions can help a patient to improve their medical outcome significantly. The HOPE questions are a set number of questions that nurses ask their patients, and the answers required are ranked on the Likert Scale (Batstone et al., 2020). The third tool is the open invite which mainly focuses on the patient. The device encourages spiritual dialogue between nurses, medical service providers, and patients. The conversation may help nurses discover the cause of a patient’s spiritual perception and its implication on their general reaction to medical interventions, especially uncomfortable ones like chemotherapy.
Since many people around the globe highly value religion, spirituality is essential in the medical sector. The tools discussed above have significantly helped nurses engage with patients empathetically and devise effective clinical interventions tailored to a patient’s religion. Additionally, specific spiritual assessment tools like the SPIRIT tool help student nurses understand their religious perceptions and how they can incorporate them in their care to help patients of similar religious preferences. The tools have been subjected to several tests and enhancements, especially among adults comprising of nurses, patients, and the general population, to make them more effective because the healthcare sector is ever-changing.