Using research skills to inform the teaching of spirituality

Spirituality, a basic characteristic of all people, is vital to health (; ) and therefore knowledge about this phenomenon is important for nurses. Australia's population has been defined as multicultural with successive Governments encouraging the maintenance of peoples' cultural heritage. Moreover, the Australian Council of Healthcare Standards (ACHS) state that nurses will meet the spiritual needs of individual patients (). The difficulty for Australian nurses is that no research has been conducted to ascertain the spiritual needs of patients and/or clients from the differing multicultural groups. In order to gain knowledge and understanding of patients and/or clients' spiritual needs I utilised the research skills of data collection and analysis. I then used the embodied themes from the data to inform my teaching in order that students would gain applicable knowledge and understanding about spirituality that was inclusive of the various multicultural groups. Although this project was conducted in Western Australia, the method could be adopted by nurses elsewhere in order to understand more about the spirituality of the population in which they practice.