Spiritual Assessment Tools - Essay Example

This research will begin with the statement that spirituality is an aspect of life that is related to holistic nursing in terms of beliefs and behaviors. Dossey gave an understanding of spirituality as that broad concept which takes into account values, rationale and meaning; one’s turns towards the human traits of personal sincerity, devotion, caring, understanding, empathy, and imagination; a graceful, dynamic poise allowing and creating body-mind-spirit restoration to health; and the existence of a quality of a higher authority, that guides mystical transcendence and personal spirit.

On spirituality still, Pamela Reed adds to the definition that spirituality is entirely about expressions of developmental capacity for self-transcendence. Spirituality can be perceived as that very close affiliation that exists between an individual and a supreme being who is believed to be directing anyone’s beliefs and practices during the life time. Spiritual Assessment carried out by medical practitioners is the fundamental process of gathering, analyzing and synthesizing salient data to be used for appropriately planning nursing care into multidimensional formulations that are capable of providing the basis for action decisions on medical administration.

From the perspective of a holistic approach, it is well established that spiritual assessment is an action taken with the assumption that spiritual wishes have dedicated influences on all other factors of an individual’s life.. Below are discussions of two of these Spiritual Assessments Tools, and their effectiveness in terms of timing and use effectiveness (LaRocca-Pitts M., 2008). a) FICA FICA is a spiritual historical tool that was created by Dr. Christine Puchalski together with Daniel Sulmasy, Joan Teno and Dale Mathews in 1996 with the view of providing means through which clinicians could efficiently integrate the open-ended investigative questions checking into a standardized medical history and that which could be applied by health care professionals.

This technique identifies key elements that a physician or clinician may be in need of to determine any patients’ spiritual belief in the medical settings. FICA, as a spiritual assessment tool, is based on four fundamental domains which are: the presence and recognitions of faith, belief, and their meaning to an individual; the importance of spirituality on one’s life and the immense influence that the belief system or values have on the individual’s spiritual community; and the timeless interventions to address such spiritual needs.

FICA is mostly used because of its effectiveness and comprehensiveness in assessing varied spiritual dimensions as may be based on existing correlations with spiritual indicators; especially in the view of spiritual activities, alterations in spirituality, positive life changes, purpose, and hopefulness. It is able to offer provisional frameworks for clinicians to initiate discussions about those aspects deemed meaningful to patients, i.e. families, work, and faith. FICA provides information things that are supportive to patients, i.e. spiritual communities; and also gives information concerning spiritual beliefs that most likely affects health care decision