Fisher (1998) proposed a spiritual well-being model, comprising primary factors for the domains of personal, communal, environmental and transcendental well-being, that cohere to form a single higher order or global spiritual well-being dimension. In line with this model, Gomez and Fisher (2003) published the Spiritual Well-Being Questionnaire (SWBQ), with scales for measuring personal, communa...

CONTEXT Community-based clergy are highly engaged in helping terminally ill patients address spiritual concerns at the end of life (EOL). Despite playing a central role in EOL care, clergy report feeling ill-equipped to spiritually support patients in this context. Significant gaps exist in understanding how clergy beliefs and practices influence EOL care. OBJECTIVES The objective of this stu...

Pain relief is a management problem for many patients, their families, and the medical professionals caring for them. Although everyone experiences pain to some degree, responses to it vary from one person to another. Recognizing and specifying someone else's pain is clinically a well know challenge. Research on the biology and neurobiology of pain has given us a relationship between spirituali...

BACKGROUND Although the General Medical Council recommends that United Kingdom medical students are taught 'whole person medicine', spiritual care is variably recognised within the curriculum. Data on teaching delivery and attainment of learning outcomes is lacking. This study ascertained views of Faculty and students about spiritual care and how to teach and assess competence in delivering suc...

abstract background: stillbirth is one of the deepest losses that can inflict a broad range of cognitive, mental, spiritual, and physical turmoil. many researchers believe that the failure to provide the care required by health teams during the hard times is the main determinant of maternal mental health in the future. in other words, social support can significantly improve the mental health o...

As part of a cross-sectional, quantitative study on adjustment factors in long-term breast cancer survival, 52 women were asked to write in their own words how religious and spiritual factors played a part in their understanding of and coping with this illness. A subsample of 39 women responded to this question. The qualitative method of content analysis was used to define meaning units, descri...

The purpose of this study is to see if greater awareness of the historical role of the church in the black community is associated with a greater sense of self-worth among older African Americans. A latent variable model is evaluated that contains the following core hypotheses: (1) older blacks who go to church more often will receive more spiritual support (i.e. encouragement to adopt religiou...