Peer-reviewed article
Intentional spiritual care for sick children: A beacon for decreasing stress and nurturing spirituality
Kathleen I. Harris ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This article examines how healthcare professionals can provide intentional spiritual care to sick children and their families in hospital settings. The author conducted an ethnographic study observing how medical staff supported the spiritual needs of hospitalized children. The work argues that recognizing each family's personal journey allows healthcare professionals to make more purposeful choices about spiritual involvement. The article presents characteristics, principles, and practical activities that healthcare professionals can use to address the spiritual domain of young patients.
Key points
- Spiritual care for sick children is an important concern for health and medical professionals
- Healthcare professionals can make more intentional choices about spiritual involvement when aware of each family's personal journey
- An ethnographic research study documented activities showing how medical personnel nurtured and supported children's spiritual domain
- Specific activities and interventions are recommended that healthcare professionals can use to care for spiritual needs
Limitations
The document provides only an abstract and does not specify which activities and interventions were documented or what specific findings emerged from the ethnographic study. The evidence base for effectiveness of the recommended spiritual care approaches is not detailed in this excerpt.
Abstract
Every family who enters a hospital is on a personal journey. The awareness of that particular journey allows us to make more intentional and purposeful choices about how health and medical professionals want to be spiritually involved with each child and family. Spiritual care for sick children raises an important concern for health and medical professionals. The purpose of this article is to introduce the role of children’s spirituality in administering intentional spiritual care for the hearts, minds, and spirits of sick children and their families in health care settings. Characteristics and principles of intentional spiritual care are discussed along with a variety of activities and interventions healthcare professionals can use effectively when taking care of the spiritual needs of young patients in hospitals. By conducting an ethnographic research study and collecting data as a participant-observer, the author documented activities with hospitalised children and how medical personnel nurtured and supported their spiritual domain.
Findings the Hub has extracted
Each claim below is labelled by its type of design and links back to this report.
- Intervention
- Intentional spiritual care by healthcare professionals including various activities and interventions to support the spiritual domain of hospitalized children
- Population
- Hospitalized children and their families in hospital settings
Key finding
Medical personnel successfully nurtured and supported the spiritual domain of hospitalized children