Integrating spirituality into critical care: an APN perspective using Roy's adaptation model

Integration of the spiritual domain into the nursing plan of care positively influences health and wellness. Applying nursing theory to practice reinforces the advanced practice nurse's (APN's) responsibility to integrate spiritual care into the critical care environment. Indeed, all nurses have an obligation to integrate spiritual care because the focus of nursing care is beneficence. Moreover, the focus of APN care is not curing, but healing. Healing can be assisted by entering into the patient's suffering to help reconstruct life plans and facilitate realizing meaning from the despair of illness even while facing extreme adversity and death. This article describes spiritual care of the critically ill adult patient and the role that the APN must, can, and should take to assimilate spiritual care into care of these patients and their families.