Following Jesus in Nursing

Welcome to Following Jesus in Nursing, a podcast for nurses and students produced by InterVarsity's Nurses Christian Fellowship. I'm your host, Lara Kay Kaiser, and together we'll be inspired by our guest stories, tackle big questions with experts in the field, and walk together in following Jesus at the intersection of faith and nursing.

We are uncomfortable with the spiritual or with sensitive dialogue. So what happens is, Let me call the chaplain for you. Or who do you go to church? Can I get your church number? And I think what we don't realize is that we can be right there.

Hey, y'all. Welcome back for season 2, where we'll be taking a deeper dive into the topic of spiritual care. Today's episode, we'll just get our feet wet by laying some groundwork for us about what spiritual care is and why it's so important to us in Nurses Christian Fellowship. Back with us today and actually for the whole season is our director, Dr. Kathy Schoonover Schoffner. Kathy, welcome back.

It's so good to have you again on the podcast.

Thank you. I'm excited to be here.

Yeah. So we did have you on last season for our very first episode ever, which was delightful. So welcome back. And just for those who might have missed that episode or haven't gotten a chance to listen to it yet, could you just reintroduce yourself and tell us what's new in your life since you were last on?

Well, my name is Kathy Schoonover-Schoffner. And, yes, it is a long name, hyphenated actually, from pre-marriage, post-marriage. I have been the editor of the Journal of Christian Nursing for 20 years, and I've been the National Director of NCF for the last nine years, which makes it sound like I'm old, but I'm not. I'm actually very young. But since our last recording, I mean, God's been doing some incredible things in NCF.

Student ministry is growing. We've been getting fantastic articles in for the journal that we're excited to get out to people. There's actually less of me. I've lost about 50 pounds, which I needed to do. It's hard to lose weight.

I've been chunky all my life and come from a obese family, but it's been a spiritual journey. And probably a really fun thing is I'm now a dog person. On Labor Day weekend, my daughter was driving and someone threw a little dog out their car and she thought it was trash and she stopped and it was a little chihuahua. And she has dogs, so we took on Stella. And Stella is now my constant companion. I'm enjoying the friendship of a dog who takes me for what I am no matter what.

That's so cute.

Less of me now, dog person, and still pushing on for NCF.

So much has changed and so much is the same. As a cat person, I'll allow it. Stella is adorable. She's got these big ears. She's so cute.

She is. And she's probably smaller than many cats.

That's true. She's a little thing. Well, we are gonna take a deeper dive this season on spiritual care. So we did have a couple of episodes last season on spiritual care, and we just thought it was so much fun and so good, and there was just so much more to unpack. So I just thought we could start off with the basics. So what is spiritual care, Kathy? And what is there, like, a particular definition that you would like us to work with throughout this season?

Yeah. So what's interesting it is that spirituality is probably the most basic part of nursing, and yet it's the least understood aspect of caring for the whole person. Research has shown that nurses don't feel comfortable giving spiritual care. They want more information and more training. And as I thought about this, this huge part of our nursing, but we aren't comfortable with it.

And so what is it? Well, we break it down. The word spirit or spirituality comes from the Latin word spiritus that means breath. And so it's like the essence of life. Our spirituality is part of the mundane and the secular as well as profound experiences and sacred.

And our spirituality is what gives us meaning, purpose, direction, peace. It's about relationships beyond us, connects us with God and with each other and with ourselves. And as I prepared for this podcast, I thought, well, if spirituality is this huge basic foundational part of nursing, you know, there's definitions out the wazoo, but in the simplest terms and I guess what I'd like us to keep in mind for this season is that spiritual care is simply caring for the spirit, the individual spirit, the family. It's caring for the spirit, and it's certainly broader than religious care. It can involve religious care and about people's faith traditions, but it really involves just assessing spiritual needs, people's sense of love, need for belonging, for hope, finding forgiveness, why is there suffering.

And it's just meeting them in those needs and facilitating both vertical relationships with God and horizontal relationships with others. So it's caring for the spirit. That's not super complex and researchy, educated sounding, but that's what it is when you boil all the definitions down.

I love that. I like that it's basic as our breath, what you said about the spirit and what that means. That's honestly kind of beautiful and simple in some ways that I think are easy to grasp. So thank you for that definition. Tell me more about what makes spiritual care such an important topic to you personally.

Well, all nurses know that we want to provide whole person care for the bio-psychosocial spiritual person. So we're caring for them physically, emotionally, socially, and spiritually, and that's been the essence of nursing throughout the ages and even our modern founder of modern nursing, Florence Nightingale, says the same thing. And if the essence of who we are is a spiritual being, then as nurses, if we're gonna provide whole person care, we have to integrate spirituality into our care. And every worldview, whether it's Christian, Judaism, Eastern worldviews, pantheism, all worldviews believe that we are fully integrated bio, psycho, social, spiritual beings, and that's just the whole of nursing. So in order to care for the person, we have to provide all of that care, and we've come up with a term called holistic care.

That's what we do. And I've learned that from nursing school, back a long time ago. And my 40 years of nursing practice has taught me the critical need for spiritual care. I've worked in oncology and intensive care, in cardiac rehab, behavioral health, and administration. And I've really never met or had a patient or colleague or coworker who doesn't have a spirit, obviously, and who doesn't need spiritual connection and spiritual care.

But I think what really brought it home for me is 6 years ago, my husband fell off the roof onto concrete, and he had a severe traumatic brain injury. And he was hospitalized for six months. And even as his life was hanging in the balance and the physical care was so critical to keep him alive, I kept longing for people who would care for me spiritually, who would realize he was a spiritual being and touch him and recognize him in that way. And the caregivers who touched our spirits, who saw us as people needing a spiritual touch, as needing connection, they were caring in their words and their gestures. That is how we survived. And I'll pull that apart more in later episodes about spiritual interventions and care.

And even now with my life, caring for my husband as mentally disabled. He recovered, but he's no longer able to work. It's still that care of the spirit that I long for, for people to notice me, for people to reach out to me, to see if I'm okay, to offer words. And then even for both of us, even though it's hard for him, understanding that abstractness. But our time with God, my relationship with God through Bible study and prayer and fellowship with other Christians, I couldn't survive without that. That feeds my spirit. My relationship with God, my relationship with others is how I've survived the last six years. So I would say spiritual care is huge.

Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing personally too, and I can see why it's deeply important to you as a nurse and also just as a person and as a caregiver, as someone who has received spiritual care from others yourself. So thank you for sharing that.

Well, the way that you're describing spiritual care kinda makes it sound like a no brainer that we shall all just jump right on this, but I know that's not necessarily easy for all of us. So could you unpack a little bit about why is that? Maybe you could just speak to some of the barriers that you hear nurses facing when they are thinking about engaging in spiritual care.

Well, I think a huge part of it is that nurses don't recognize spiritual care, that they're caring for the spirit. And they think of spiritual care as, like, well, did I pray with the patient? Did I ask them what church they go to? Did I get a chaplain in there? You know, what have I done that's specifically spiritual in nature?

And I don't think we recognize that a lot of what we do and how we just encounter and connect with patients and families is can be or should be spiritual care. So then because of that, we don't have a sense of time for spiritual care. Like, I'm trying to get their blood pressure and give their meds and take care of the machines and the equipment and make sure they get this X-ray on time and getting information to the physician, so that, you know, gosh. Now you want me to do spiritual care. So we don't see it as part of an integrated part of our care.

And, research shows and textbooks show there's little spiritual care training in nursing school and then even less on the job. And I think that's been changing in the last decade or so, but before, like, in the 2000s, that wasn't a big thing. And so nurses don't feel prepared. You know? What am I gonna say? What am I gonna do? What if I do the wrong thing?

We are uncomfortable with the spiritual or with sensitive dialogue. So what happens if someone just got diagnosed with cancer and they say, nurse, I'm afraid, and their spirit is just crying out for help, and you're like, I, um, let me call the chaplain for you. Or who do you go to church? Can I get your church number? And I think what we don't realize is that we can be right there. And we may not have all the answers, and this person may need deeper, longer intervention than we can do, but I can still touch their spirit, connect with them, offer support. And, again, having been a nurse for a long time and then having been a wife of a person who was in the hospital for six months, I'm telling you those things are lifelines. And that spiritual care is just as important as some pastor coming in or some big religious intervention. I think it's even more important because you're in the hospital 24/7 or you're needing that support so much, and it's just the little things and that spirit touching spirit.

Yeah. And in fact, I think spiritual care you know, we've been trying to help nurses overcome these barriers for years. And so when I became the editor at JCN, we started a a column or a one-page essay that we call FAQs and spiritual care, frequently asked questions in spiritual care. And we've addressed a lot of barriers. There's, like, 80 questions that we've asked and tried to give just one-page practical answers to.

Again, this isn't comprehensive, and you're not gonna write a big dissertation on it from these. But we also point to where you can look for more information. And so we've asked things like, what can I do when my manager says I can't give spiritual care? Woah. What could you do? Manager says, stop that. Or how do I pray with the patient? How do I give spiritual care to persons with dementia? We've just asked many, many questions, and then we've also tried to provide support to nurses like, well, I'm spiritually struggling. How am I supposed to support the patient who's spiritually struggling? Or I'm feeling really burned out. How am I supposed to get spiritual care? So I would refer people to those because we address some of the barriers that nurses bring up. How do I make time for spiritual care? We're trying to help nurses look at various, ask questions, and figure out what can we do to engage in better spiritual care.

Did you know that our Journal of Christian Nursing is online? To find the collection of FAQs in spiritual care that Kathy just mentioned, please visit journalofChristiannursing.com. You'll see a blue bar at the top. Click on Collections and the FAQs are the fourth one on the drop down menu. The link will also be in our show notes.

Kathy has even generously made this collection free to access right now. And if you would like to receive your very own quarterly print copy of the Journal of Christian Nursing and full access online to our entire archives, you can sign up for membership at ncf-jcn.org/membership. Don't forget to use the coupon code 'following' for $10 off.

That's so great, Kathy. Thank you. And we're gonna get into that more throughout the rest of the season, the rest of the episodes. So could you just give us a little overview of what people can expect? What are we gonna cover this season, and who who should listen?

As we thought about what could be helpful, we came up with about six topics. First, just being prepared for spiritual care. So organically, how can I prepare to make this part of my practice? How do I integrate it into, you know, how do I go in as a nurse and I'm ready? I'm spiritually prepared.

We are gonna call that organically preparing for spiritual care. And then, so what what is integrated spiritual care? What is fully integrated spiritual care look like? How is it really a part of all we do? And I'm gonna argue or I'm gonna suggest that doing physical care is very much an opportunity to do great spiritual care.

So then the next episode, as Christian nurses, how do I follow the Holy Spirit's lead? If I'm a follower of Jesus and the Holy Spirit's in my life, is it possible that God could lead me as I care for this patient today? What does that mean, and how do we pull that apart? I think that nurses can feel guilty because, well, I didn't tell that patient about you, or I didn't pray for that patient, or we think there's certain spiritual things we're supposed to do. And, you know, I'm not sure the Holy Spirit's always leading us to do that.

But what does that mean to be led by the Holy Spirit? We're gonna talk about on-the-go spiritual assessment for the everyday nurse. So there are incredible spiritual assessment tools. You can spend a lot of time doing a spiritual assessment. And the people who research this and develop these tools, I mean, these are great, but what we've all come to realize is that most caregivers are there on the spot.

And so what am I looking for? How can I do kind of an on-the-go effective spiritual assessment? We want to look at spiritual interventions. What are profoundly powerful spiritual interventions? And I've kinda hinted to what I think some of those could be.

I think perhaps the intervention is profoundly powerful depending on the nurse and his or her attitude and his or her connection in doing it. But we'll get more into that. And we liked the idea of the alliteration, profoundly powerful spiritual interventions.

And then finally, how do you know spiritual care was successful? You know, we give them medication and their pain decreases or their blood pressure's high. We give them things we can do that we know worked. Well, how do we know spiritual care is effective? What are the kind of outcomes? What are the things that we can look for? And so we just wanna kind of pull those apart and give some practical help and learn ourselves what is God saying to us about spiritual care.

That's great. And who should listen?

Well, I think nursing students are great. It would be great because these can offer you more than you might get in your nursing school classes, more than you might get in your textbooks. Educators know you gotta learn spiritual care. And, you know, I should look this up. What are the NCLEX test exams about spiritual care and spirituality?

But you want to gain knowledge and skill and spiritual caregiving. You wanna gain confidence. And at the least, maybe you can impress your teachers with something you've learned, make your clinicals a little less challenging. And I would hope that the educators would gain ideas and support for teaching spiritual care and also for connecting spiritually with students and caring for them.

I think for all of us, especially seasoned nurses, we all need to gain skill in spiritual caregiving. We can gain skill by studying, learning, practicing. But as I thought about this, I think a huge benefit, what I think is invaluable, is nurses are experiencing burnout. We read all the time: changing jobs. COVID made a huge impact, some leaving the profession.

And I think, what if you could reinvigorate your feelings about nursing and your thoughts about nursing and this idea of incorporating spirituality into your nursing practice? What if that helped to refuel you in your work? What if that reinvigorated your sense of caring and who you were? I think one of the most exciting aspects of primary nursing care for me, and even today as NCF director or as in my relationships with others, you know, when I could leave a shift knowing that a patient was spiritually cared for and and sometimes something extraordinary happened because I was spiritually present for a patient or their family, I can't tell you. There's nothing like it. Like, if you're tired and burned out and worn out, well, think about spiritual care.

Experiencing that, it's kind of like a Jamba Juice or something. You got to experience something amazing and incredible by being spiritually present with someone. And I think, I don't know. I'm not gonna say that's the answer to burnout, but I think it's huge because there's such an amazing sense of fulfillment and caring spiritually for others.

That's beautiful. Thanks, Kathy. So as we wrap up this episode, what is your main hope for this season as we get started? So in other words, at the end of the season, what do you hope each listener will walk away with?

I would like for every listener to gain an eagerness for spiritual care. Like, oh, man. I can't wait to connect spiritually. I can't wait to see this happening. I can't wait to experience good spiritual care, to assess, wow, what happened to this patient because I recognized this and did something.

I want nurses, students, educators to feel confident, to be prepared to overcome phobia or dread or roadblocks to spiritual care. And I thought, you know, we don't have phobias about assessing blood pressures, or I'm pretty good at listening to heart sounds because I was a cardiac nurse for years. I'm pretty good at anatomy and physiology, so I don't have a phobia about, oh, gee. Did I get the breath sounds right? Well, I think the skill of spiritual care can be as natural as other nursing actions. It's like, yeah, this is what I heard. Let me check. Yep. That's it. And what can we do to intervene? And so just like improving our nursing skills and other areas of biopsychosocial, physical, you know, the care, we can easily improve our spiritual caregiving skills, and I would love for nurses to feel reinvigorated and gain this eagerness about spiritually caring for others.

I love that. Thank you so much, Kathy. I really appreciate this, and I'm excited to do this rest of this season with you.

Thank you. I'm looking forward to it.

Kathy and I will pick this conversation back up in the next episode as we continue our season 2 deeper dive into spiritual care. We'll also be trying something new this spring. We'll be hosting a couple of Zoom calls for you all to join me and Kathy to bring your questions and reflections on spiritual care to have a conversation together about what we're all learning this season. So be on the lookout on our social media website or show notes for more information about these Zoom gatherings or just stay tuned for announcements in our next episodes. In the meantime, I would be absolutely delighted to hear from you about your own experiences of navigating spiritual care in your nursing practice.

Do you have a story to share, advice based on your own learning, or maybe questions about how to practice spiritual care better? Message me on Instagram at Jesus Nurse Pod or email me at ncf@intervarsity.org using the subject line 'podcast'. Here's a snippet of reflections from one of our listeners, Rowan, from Madison, Wisconsin.

When I was first listening to this episode, I think the idea of spiritual care does sound really intimidating like Kathy was saying. But I was really excited to think of spiritual care as not just religious care, but it's like you're seeing the soul and meeting the unmet need of the person. I'm really excited for this season because I think that sounds super doable, but also something that's super applicable. I think the patients that feel most cared for by me are the ones where I saw something they needed, and I was able to meet that in a conversation with them.

I had a patient who had been diagnosed with cancer. And, really, they were, like, super downtrodden. Like, they had two months to live, and they've been given this diagnosis. And I sat with them, and we just talked about what they were feeling and how being present for it with them. And I think that in that was a form of spiritual care where you're there, you're listening, and you're hearing what other people need. So I'm really excited for learning more tools about how to be able to better care for my patients and provide spiritual care.

Hey. Thanks for joining us for another inspiring episode of Following Jesus in Nursing. We hope you've been encouraged and equipped in integrating your faith with your nursing practice. Be sure to check out our show notes for info about connecting with Nurses Christian Fellowship as well as links and resources mentioned in today's episode. Don't forget to check out NCF membership at ncf-jcn.org and use the coupon code 'following' for $10 off.

And remember, as you go about your work as a nurse, you are not alone. Jesus is right there with you, guiding your steps and using you to bring healing to those in need. Thanks for listening to Following Jesus in Nursing, and may your faith continue to be a light in the world of health care.