Interconnections: Spirituality, Spiritual Care, and Patient-Centered Care

The interconnections of spirituality, spiritual care (SC), and patient-centered care (PCC) have implications for advanced practice nurses (APNs) and specialty care nurses (SNs) in their everyday practice. Spirituality has been identified as an inner resource for health, promoting hope, coping, and resilience during illness concerns; encouraging health promotion and maintenance; and improving patient outcomes. SC supports this inner resource and is provided by others. Systems can help facilitate SC by supporting the inter-personal relationships as well as transdisciplinary collaborations of PCC models. SC and PCC occur within inter-personal relationships and specific healthcare environments or systems when implementing them within a spirituality framework. This article provides a brief review on conceptual definitions of spirituality, SC, and PCC models and their relationship to each other within the inter-personal connections. Exploration of implementing such care in practice is presented. Search parameters for this review included manuscripts which provided conceptual as well as quantitative and qualitative research between 1990 and 2018, in English only, with keywords of spirituality, SC, PCC, nurse, nurse practitioner, APNs, and systems. Databases searched included CINHAL, Medline, PubMed, ALTA Religion, Psych-INFO, and Ovid. Articles included in this review were based on research of the above concepts as well as operationalizing the concepts into practice.