Unlike hospice care which entails providing services to the terminally ill patients whose physicians have declared that they have only six months to live, palliative care does not postpone nor speed up death, it helps relieve pain and symptoms by offering support which the client needs to live actively and functionally.
Part 1 - Spirituality and Music in Palliative care.
Palliative care may also involve other professional disciplines to ensure that the patient receives all the necessary services. In this article, I will review and explore the perceptions of nurses and patients on spirituality and music in palliative care.
Spirituality and Palliative Care.
Spirituality in general has been shown to contribute to patients’ comfort at the end of life and has been identified as one of the key concerns of dying patients who need support. Spirituality does not necessarily mean that one’s beliefs are religious based, it is therefore unique in everyone and may be explored and assessed in one’s own values, beliefs, relationships, attitudes, practices, their hopes, fears, meaning and purpose in life as reported by Kernoham, Waldron, McAfee, Cochrane, & Hasson (2007).
Music and Palliative Care.
Music on the other hand, has been around for many decades. It is experienced in many cultures around the world for comfort, leisure, exercise, relaxing, spiritual purposes and mainly serves as a form of entertainment.
Key Studies - Palliative Care.
Johnson and Smith (2006) posed three questions that addressed the nurses - and patients perception of palliative care. The questions, focused on palliative care from the patient’s and a nurse’s perspective and on the differences between patients’ and nurses’ perceptions in palliative nursing care. Johnson et al. (2006) discovered that patients had the desire to maintain and remain in control as their nurses’ aimed at helping the patients improve their quality of life and dignity of death.
The nurses built therapeutic relationships with the patients in an attempt to control the patients’ pain and distressing symptoms, and in addressing these symptoms, the patients’ spiritual health was in fact addressed.
In contrast, Desbiens and Fillion (2007) focused only on the nurses’ coping strategies, emotional outcomes and their spiritual quality of life. Desbiens et al. (2007) connects Johnson et al. (2006) study which focused on what the nurses do for their patients and their perceptions, the study however, did not describe further on how the nurses cope with their patients’ passing and/or how their purpose in life was directly affected during that process.
Desbiens et al. (2007) study actually demonstrated the nurses’ coping strategies, emotional outcomes and their spiritual quality of life when dealing with bereavement after the passing of their patients. Desbiens et al. (2007) found out that the nurses’ coping strategies for adapting to bereavement was very important and a greater use of disengagement strategies appeared to favor the nurses’ greater emotional distress. Spirituality was confirmed by Desbiens et al. (2007) to provide a positive relationship between meaning-making strategies and nurses’ spiritual quality of life.
Part 2 of Spirituality and Music in Palliative care will continue on our next edition.
