Reimer-Kirkham, Sheryl;
Sharma, Sonya;
(2023)
The social relations of prayer in healthcare: Adding to nursing's equity-oriented professional practice and disciplinary knowledge.
Nursing Inquiry
, Article e12608. 10.1111/nin.12608.
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Abstract
Although spiritual practices such as prayer are engaged by many to support well-being and coping, little research has addressed nurses and prayer, whether for themselves or facilitating patients' use of prayer. We conducted a qualitative study to explore how prayer (as a proxy for spirituality and religion) is manifest—whether embraced, tolerated, or resisted—in healthcare, and how institutional and social contexts shape how prayer is understood and enacted. This paper analyzes interviews with 21 nurses in Vancouver and London as a subset of the larger study. Findings show that nurses' kindness can buffer the loneliness and exclusion of ill health and in this way support the “spirit” of those in their care. Spiritual support for patients rarely incorporated prayer, in part because of ambiguities about permission and professional boundaries. Nurses' engagement with prayer and spiritual support could become a politicized site of religious accommodation, where imposition, religious illiteracy, and racism could derail person-centered care and consequently enact social exclusion. Spiritual support (including prayer) sustained nurses themselves. We propose that nursing's equity-oriented knowledge encompass spirituality and religion as sites of exclusion and inclusion. Nurses must be supported to move past religious illiteracy to provide culturally and spiritually sensitive care with clarity about professional boundaries and collaborative models of spiritual care.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | The social relations of prayer in healthcare: Adding to nursing's equity-oriented professional practice and disciplinary knowledge |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1111/nin.12608 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1111/nin.12608 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © The Authors. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ |
| Keywords: | equity, nursing practice, prayer, qualitative analysis and interpretation, racialized religion, religion, spirituality |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education > IOE - Social Research Institute |
| URI: | https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10179502 |
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