Holistic Nursing of Forensic Patients: A Focus on Spiritual Care
Journal Title: Religions - Year 2016, Vol 7, Issue 3
Abstract
Prisons are a unique context where nurses are required to have specific skills to ensure that prisoners receive the same type of holistic care as anyone else out of prison, including spiritual care. This discussion paper focuses on understanding how nurses deliver spiritual care in Italian prisons where there are often limited resources and where organizational priorities hinder the provision of holistic nursing. This paper draws from a previous qualitative research study that we had conducted. In this study, we observed that prison nurses reported that they experienced many difficulties related to the provision of holistic care to prisoners. This was particularly true for spiritual care in vulnerable forensic patients, such as older individuals, and physically and mentally frail prisoners. Prison officers did not allow nurses to just “listen and talk” to their patients in prison, because they considered it a waste of time. The conflict between prison organizational constraints and nursing goals, along with limited resources placed barriers to the development of therapeutic relationships between nurses and prisoners, whose holistic and spiritual care needs remained totally unattended. Therefore, prison organizational needs prevailed over prisoners’ needs for spiritual care, which, while fundamental, are nevertheless often underestimated and left unattended. Educational interventions are needed to reaffirm nurses’ role as providers of spiritual care.
Authors and Affiliations
Annamaria Bagnasco, Giuseppe Aleo, Barbara Delogu, Gianluca Catania and Loredana Sasso
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP25528
- DOI https://doi.org/10.3390/rel7030031
- Views 301
- Downloads 8
Spiritual Needs of Patients with Chronic Diseases
For many patients confronted with chronic diseases, spirituality/religiosity is an important resource for coping. Patients often report unmet spiritual and existential needs, and spiritual support is also associated wi...
Somatic Energies and Emotional Traumas: A Qualitative Study of Practice-Related Challenges Reported by Vajrayana Buddhists
A qualitative study of Western practitioners of Buddhist meditation investigated unexpected, challenging, difficult, and distressing experiences. This paper reports on a subset of 12 practitioners within Tibetan Vajray...
Auguste Comte and Consensus Formation in American Religious Thought—Part 1: The Creation of Consensus
French intellectual Auguste Comte was the most influential sociologist and philosopher of science in the Nineteenth Century. This first of two articles summarizes his complex life’s works and details reactions to them...
Augustine’s Confessions: Interiority at the Core of the Core Curriculum
When St. Bonaventure University decided to redesign its core curriculum, we turned to Bonaventure’s account of the mind’s journey to God in the Itinerarium Mentis in Deum as a paradigm by which to give coherence to the...
Feminisms and Challenges to Institutionalized Philosophy of Religion
For my invited contribution to this special issue of Religions on “Feminisms and the Study of ‘Religions,’” I focus on philosophy of religion and contestations over its relevance to the academic field of Religious Stud...