Spiritual Care Ethical Dilemmas

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Recommended: Spirituality in nursing organizations and policies

Introduction Spiritual Care can be very important when it comes to patient-centered care. Rebecca L. Polzer Casarez and Joan C. Engebretson published a study on how spiritual care can cause ethical dilemmas in the health care setting. A Ethical dilemma can be defined in Dee McGonigle and Kathleen Garver Martian’s Nursing Informatics and the foundation of knowledge (2015) as “a difficult choice or issue that requires the application of standards or principles to solve. Issues that challenge us ethically” (McGonigle &Martian, 2015, p. 528). Spiritual Care has been around since the beginning of time, and with the introduction of the medical model of care it now poses a dilemma to health care workers (nurses and physicians), as well as patients. Casarez and Engebretson thoroughly discuss spiritual care within the clinical practice in their article.
Summary
Casarez and Engebretson (2012) discovered four themes throughout their research, first was the ethical concerns of omission, second the ethical concerns of commission, third conditions for spiritual care and lastly strategies to …show more content…

This is when spiritual care is not put into practice correctly (Casarez & Engebretson, 2012). The health care provider possibly misreads how the patients spirituality can be applied to their car or the health care provide attempts to implement their own spiritual beliefs onto the patient. Casarez and Engebretson (2012) go into depth with descriptive and prescriptive uses of spiritual care (p. 2102). Descriptive is using the patients spirituality to benefit their care, while prescriptive is putting a “spiritual goal” into the patient plan of care (Casarez & Engebretson, 2012). Healthcare providers may not be totally competent when it comes to the spirituality of the patient Casarez and Engebretson (2012) discuss how healthcare provides do not have appropriate training to provide spiritual care for their

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