Recognising spiritual needs

Implementing spirituality in healthcare starts by understanding the importance of this dimension in life and health and then recognising how to implement this effectively. Addressing patients’ spiritual needs is critical to support a holistic assessment and to guide specific interventions and overall nursing care. Spiritual needs are diverse, individual, universal, and dynamic. As such, this chapter displays and defines a set of spiritual needs that are important to address in a paradigm of clinical reasoning that commences with assessing, diagnosing, planning interventions, and evaluating health outcomes. Still, each patient should be attended to as unique, and spiritual needs confirm this holistic and individual approach that grounds healthcare delivery.