Essay Sample on Exploring Spirituality: Oncology and Beyond

Spirituality entails aspects that cannot be seen but need further exploration to define how individuals live. Spirituality is defined as a belief is a supreme being, quest for meaning, personal growth, and understanding one's inner dimension. The primary goal of conducting a spiritual assessment is to acknowledge a patient's resources, hopes, needs, and possible results concerning spirituality and outline the appropriate steps required to address these issues.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

I work in the Oncology and Hospice specialty of health care and I believe that my patients freely express their religion and spiritual beliefs and as we don't always have a formal conversation like the one I conducted with my patient diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, we have services like chaplain, chapel, and time to talk about how our patients see their religion as a guiding light to their illness and therefore care for it.

The Joint Commission mandates institutions like hospitals to conduct a spiritual assessment on patients to outline how the spiritual outlook of a patient looks and impact on their care, services, and treatment. As a final year in a nursing school, I work as an intern at the Oncology and Hospice specialty. I believe that the patients I serve freely express their spiritual beliefs and religion. Besides, I apply the "HOPE" question that entails the primary questions and initiate a conversation concerning my patient's religious and spiritual beliefs.

I have developed a relationship with my patient because she was referred to our hospital floor several times after undergoing chemotherapy and having side effects of the chemo. Currently, the patient is happy to talk about her disease procedure and her daily progress. She also talked about how religion has convinced her not to give up. Besides, as her nurse, I had time to interview her concerning her region. However, I wished that I could have had enough time to make this interview to be more casual as compared to the question and answer question I had with her. Nonetheless, the conversation I had with this patient has strengthened our nurse-patient relationship to facilitate further conversations shortly.

When we admit a patient in our department, the department goes through a virtual "Patient Data Profile". This move helps us to identify some social aspects like spirituality, nutrition, smoking, and drinking. Besides, I do not have an in-depth process with any of my patients in these aspects in that I am usually on night shifts and this time always find most of the patients exhausted. During this time I usually have a nonverbal conversation with the patients and always seek the guidance of their family members for any assistance.

I apply the HOPE tool because it is easily memorized and I will be in a position to rephrase my questions and have a better experience asking them. I have a plan to put more emphasis on my spiritual assessment in my nursing practice. I think that I may have shied away from this action in my past in that I believed that religion did not play a big part in healing. However, I have come to acknowledge that patients come from different backgrounds and it is my responsibility to assess various aspects of a patient but not just the diagnosis part.