One of the easiest ways to provide spiritual care is to simply ask patients how you can support them and then do everything possible to comply with the request. For example, if your patient is a Greek Orthodox Christian and wants to see a priest before they have surgery, call the Greek Orthodox Church in your community and ask if the priest would be willing to visit him. However, remember not to promise your patient anything you're not sure you can deliver. Rather than ensuring the presence of a Greek Orthodox priest before 3 p.m., many people with dementia will remember the hymns they sang as children or at an earlier age.
Play songs and religious hymns from their time for comfort and spiritual well-being. Encourage residents to sing or hum familiar songs. Most of you work, study, dine and enjoy leisure activities such as watching Netflix, all in air-conditioned rooms. And, therefore, they have consciously begun to practice spiritual wellness activities for their greater well-being.
To provide emotional and spiritual support, I have found that it is much more useful to name the emotions that patients or family members are heard expressing and then ask a follow-up question. Activities related to spiritual health may also be associated with personal care and emotional health care. Remember that its function is simply to facilitate the religious or spiritual desires of the residents, in consultation with the person and their families. The goal of providing spiritual care is not to convert patients to their religion, but to connect them to the divine if they so choose.
Activities may include attending mass, praying or singing together, creating a sanctuary, or receiving religious advice from a minister of religion. That means going above and beyond to care not only for their physical needs, but also for their emotional and spiritual needs. One of the many advantages of this activity is that it doesn't require the person to remember anything. Consciously thinking, studying, and reflecting on spiritual health activities makes life worthwhile and makes their purpose clear.
Spiritual wellness activities integrate the mind, body and spirit by promoting harmony and enriching overall health. Just as beliefs about spirituality and religion may be different for everyone, activities that will help people care for their own spirit will be personal to them. Spiritual well-being improves and integrates all other dimensions of health, including physical, mental, emotional and social dimensions. Every health and hospice board in Scotland offers a spiritual care service comprised of a team of health chaplains and sometimes a team of volunteers.
So why don't you add some spiritual wellness activities to your daily routine? If you think your spiritual health is declining, it's time to revitalize it.
