Nursing attitudes towards recording of religious and spiritual data

Poor recording of patients' religious and spiritual information is known anecdotally and occasionally referred to in publications. Chaplains in particular encounter lack of data entries or errors in records on a routine basis. While novel forms of spiritual assessment have been discussed, the only previously published United Kingdom research on nurses' responses to patients' spiritual needs uses the approach of critical incident analysis. This article reports on the findings of a nurse focus group used to generate issues likely to resonate with staff as to why poor assessment and recording occurs. Apart from clinical factors, nurses cited the intrusiveness of questions about spirituality and the feeling that assessment was 'unnecessary' as major reasons for non-recording. The most significant finding was the correlation between clinical area and the incidence of assessment. Nurses who admitted patients and always asked for religious and spiritual information were three times more likely to work in complex clinical areas. Further training is indicated as most likely to enhance accurate recording. More research is needed to establish whether these findings are matched in practice, and to identify whether the results found in one teaching hospital are equally true for other types of hospital in the UK.