WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED from Spiritual Care Research

urses have been providing spiritual care to clients for centuries. Now, because most health care institutions are mandated to assess and support clients' spirituality, even non-religious nurses are expected to provide spiritual care. 1 Nurses today appreciate the value of providing the best in nursing care-care that is based on useful and reliable evidence. Research helps us understand how to provide the best spiritual care by asking good questions and looking for sound answers. Ultimately , we need to know how to offer effective, efficient and ethical spiritual care.An invaluable starting place to increasing our knowledge is to explore current research on spiritual care conducted by nurses. Exciting and helpful information has already been discovered. THE CONTEXT FOR SPIRITUAL CARE RESEARCH Research in spirituality in the context of health has burgeoned over the past two decades.A PubMed search in mid-2004 identified 202 clinical trials where religion was a variable for study, 30,000 articles about religion and 1,500 articles about spirituality.As of June 1, 2004, a total of 1,183 Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL) citations could be retrieved for the subject of spiritual care. Over one dozen nursing textbooks on spiritual care have been published since 1989. The design of nursing research about spiritual care and spirituality is primarily descriptive and cross-sectional (data are collected only one time).These studies often use a qualitative approach, although many are quantitative.The quantitative studies use a variety of instruments-many developed by the study investigator/s for measuring aspects of spirituality or religiosity. Although several studies explore family caregiver perspectives about spiritual care, the majority study patients-Christian patients who are generally adults. Most research conducted in the U.S. focuses on the Euro-or African-Ameri-can spiritual experience; few studies explore Hispanic or Asian client perspectives .The majority of nursing studies exploring client spirituality do so in the context of cancer, aging, chronic diseases and the end-of-life. WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED? To answer this question, PubMed and CINAHL searches were conducted to identify relevant research about spiritual care. Studies included those published in English since 1990 by nurse authors or involving nurse participants. Over sixty citations were identified for research directly related to spiritual care.Addi-tional studies (not included) explored teaching spiritual care in nursing education. What is spiritual care? Nearly twenty nurse scholars have published concept analyses of spirituality, and researchers have attempted to determine from nurses or nurse clients what spiritual care is thought to be. 2;3;4 Themes include spiritual care involving connectedness, affirming others with love and quality interpersonal nurse-client relationships. Nurse researcher Diana Conco devel