Nursing the spirit: care, public life, and the dignity of vulnerable strangers
"In response to complaints about their impersonal nature, hospitals and other modern care facilities have recently sought to rehumanize their operations by incorporating spirituality under the banner of holistic care. This development has fueled debates among intellectuals over the compatibilit...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Book |
| Language: | English |
| Subito Delivery Service: | Order now. |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
New York
Columbia University Press
2023
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| In: | Year: 2023 |
| Further subjects: | B
Spirituality
B Philosophy, Nursing B Nurse's Role |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Parallel Edition: | Erscheint auch als: Grant, Don S: Nursing the spirit. - New York : Columbia University Press, 2023. - 9780231200509 |
| Summary: | "In response to complaints about their impersonal nature, hospitals and other modern care facilities have recently sought to rehumanize their operations by incorporating spirituality under the banner of holistic care. This development has fueled debates among intellectuals over the compatibility of science and spirituality. Missing from these exchanges, however, are the workers who directly care for patients and are expected to uphold their spiritual dignity while carrying out the dictates of secular science. To illuminate dilemmas facing these humanizing agents, in Nursing the Spirit, Don Grant investigates how a public teaching hospital's nursing staff negotiates the fraught topic of patient spirituality. Based on extensive fieldwork and the most in-depth survey on spirituality ever conducted at a nonsectarian organization, he finds that a majority of nurses are willing to assume responsibility for patients' spiritual well-being and nearly half think that they provide more spiritual care than hospital chaplains. However, because they perceive their fellow nurses to be uncomfortable discussing spirituality, the topic rarely comes up in their conversations. Nurses also have mixed feelings about describing their science-oriented care as spiritually significant. Nevertheless, by engaging in subtle practices that honor patients' ultimate worth as human beings, many nurses are able to instantiate spiritual values of care, and through the stories that they tell themselves about their relations with patients, they reconcile science and spirituality. Nursing the Spirit speaks to the societal tensions that emerge when spiritual and scientific beliefs meet and why we need to be more at ease with this uncomfortable topic"-- |
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| Item Description: | Includes bibliographical references and index |
| ISBN: | 023155365X |