RATIONALE The austere setting of the intensive care unit (ICU) can suppress expressions of spirituality. OBJECTIVES To describe how family members and clinicians experience and express spirituality during the dying process in a 21-bed medical-surgical ICU. METHODS Reflecting the care of 70 dying patients, we conducted 208 semistructured qualitative interviews with 76 family members and 150 ...

Chaplaincy Today • Volume 23 Number 2 • Autumn/Winter 2007 Medical practitioners and researchers continue to explore the association between spiritual/religious (SR) concerns and illness and medical care. Koenig et al. summarize over 1600 publications that describe this relationship. In a previous publication, we reported the statistically significant web of associations between the personal/pr...

Ensuring quality of life in patients with cancer is a key priority because the growing number of survivors experience many different disease-related physical, psychological, and social effects, as well as treatment-related symptoms. Healthrelated quality of life (HRQOL) has become increasingly important in relation to patient outcomes and is recognized as a patient-reported, multidimensional co...

viktor frankl, a neurologist and the founder of logo-therapy (1969) stated that “will to meaning” is the basic essence of the universe (1). logo-therapy means therapy through meaning, which is based on the premise that man has a will-to-meaning; the meaning thus lies in suffering(2). one of the most important human functions is discovering meaning in life, which is also considered as a sign of ...

A 90-minute focus group was conducted with five male and two female Jewish professional chaplains from Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox backgrounds. This study describes and discusses eight principal themes that emerged from the focus group: (a) the identity, (b) role, and (c) practices of a chaplain; (d) Jewish chaplaincy prayers; (e) practices for chronic versus acute care; (f) patients' re...

Four separate focus group sessions were conducted in the Detroit metropolitan area to invite vital elders to speak freely about their health, health problems, health practices, and how they maintain their bio-psycho-social and spiritual well-being. Twenty-eight participants were interviewed. The majority were African American, female, widowed, Protestant, and had achieved a high school or great...

Hospice care is ideally suited to meet the psychosocial and spiritual needs of dying patients, providing the opportunity to settle financial, property, and inheritance issues; to mend lacerations in important lifetime relationships, including forgiving and asking forgiveness; and to assure a degree of autonomous control over the environment and the social and spiritual processes that attend one...

OBJECTIVES The purpose of this study was to use a qualitative approach to better understand the importance and efficacy of addressing spiritual issues within an interdisciplinary bone marrow transplant clinic from the perspectives of patients and healthcare providers. SETTING Participants were recruited from the bone marrow transplant clinic of a large urban outpatient cancer care centre in w...