Written as a practical resource to teach nurses and nursing students, this text explores how to best address spiritual assessment and care. Spirituality--the search for meaning in life and connection to others--remains relevant to all patient interactions, and is an essential component for nurses to integrate into their everyday practice. Using a multicultural and client-centered approach, chapters explore the concept of spirituality and its relationship with religion and health to directly place it into a nursing context. Reflection questions throughout the text encourage readers to analyze their own experiences with spirituality within both professional and personal contexts and affirm how a nurse's own spirituality can influence her or his practice.

Practical exercises illustrate the importance of spirituality in nursing and provide tools and means to incorporate spirituality into clinical practice. Chapters use a flexible approach that can be adapted to a variety of contexts in nursing education and practice throughout the world, applicable to self-study, traditional courses, and online programs. The text contains a wealth of pedagogical features, including case studies, discussion questions, a comprehensive bibliography, and is accompanied by an extensive instructor's manual that provides additional direction for discussion and testing. Thirteen videos, developed by the author and available online, provide the perspectives of nursing and health care professionals, clients, and families to illustrate the main points of the text.

Key Features:

• Delivers a wealth of practical tools for incorporating spirituality into nursing
• Useful for self-study, on-campus courses, and online programs
• Contains a variety of pedagogical features, including discussion questions, reflective exercises, case studies, along with an instructor's manual
• Applicable to nursing education and practice throughout the world
• Promotes holistic nursing practice

Doreen, A. Westera's profile page

Doreen Westera, MscN, MEd, RN,obtained a master of nursing degree from the University of Toronto and a master of education (counseling) degree from Memorial University, St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. She taught nursing for more than 30 years at three different universities in Canada: University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada; Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada; and Memorial University (from which she retired in 2015). Her clinical practice experience includes participation in a crisis team in a large general hospital emergency room, working as a community health nurse in a large city, and working with a local counseling agency. She has developed and taught a course on the spiritual dimensions of practice at Memorial University for many years. She has also conducted workshops and presentations on spirituality in nursing and health care both nationally and internationally. She has developed 14 video programs--13 on spirituality in various clinical contexts, plus one on resilience, for which spirituality is a theme--that are being distributed nationally and internationally. She has also conducted research related to spirituality in nursing and health care. She conducts workshops on the topic of spirituality in nursing and health care practice for Nurses Christian Fellowship Canada.