- 'The first international conference I attended was in India. Meeting nurses from all over the world was so exciting. As a Christian, it was also interesting to visit India at a time when the caste system was perhaps even more entrenched than it is today, and to discover that how we think about karma, life and death and other important issues can have a major impact on our experiences of illness,’ says Tove Giske.

Since then, she has devoted her career to researching and teaching spiritual care; how nurses deal with the big questions in life, such as faith, hope and meaning.

- 'When I came to Bergen to start my nursing degree, psychology and sociology made up a large chunk of what I had thought of as faith. But I have never doubted that faith can be incredibly important for some patients when faced with pain, anxiety and death,’ says Giske.

She believes that nurses need to adopt a whole-patient understanding, and not just be concerned with the bodily aspects. Research shows that the way patients are treated by nurses has a major impact on both the patients’ quality of life and their level of satisfaction with the health services.

Lessons from different cultures

This spring, Tove Giske contacted 12 of her research colleagues around the world to ask them if they would come to Bergen to celebrate her 60th birthday and give a talk at a conference on spiritual care. All 12 accepted her invitation. On Friday, the conference was held at VID Specialized University in Bergen. Researchers from Ghana, the Philippines, the USA, Mongolia and Europe gave talks on teaching methods and the importance of spiritual care in different cultures. The audience included participants from all over the world. The conference made it possible to make contacts and draw inspiration from several different research communities and cultures.

- ‘It was great to hear so many different perspectives and stories on the same topic,’ commented Linda Ross, a professor of nursing from the UK, after the conference. ‘Different cultures express it in different ways, but everyone has a need for meaning and hope and finding their place in the world,’ she adds.

- ‘I feel humbled,’ says Wilfred McSherry, a professor of nursing from the UK. ‘In the West, it’s easy to become arrogant and think we have all the answers, but we have a lot to learn from other cultures.’

- ‘However, not everything in other cultures is worthy of respect. It’s important to know about negative traditions that can spread disease and ignorance,’ adds René van Leeuwen from the Netherlands.

Choosing God over the doctor

Benson Owusu, a specialist nurse from Ghana, is among those who have experience with harmful religious traditions. He gave a talk on the commonly held belief in Ghana that God can cure the sick, and how many therefore prefer to go to church, the mosque or some other holy place when they are sick. In order to increase knowledge and get more people to use the public health service, Owusu founded QUIK Medical Consult, an organization of nurses, doctors and journalists who travel around and teach. On their travels they also treat the sick, but they take their religious faith seriously and pray for the sick.

- ‘God works through us,’ Owusu believes.

More prominent in the curriculum

Fuelled by new inspiration from a variety of different research communities and cultures, Tove Giske is now hoping to see spiritual care given a more distinctive place in the nursing education curriculum in Norway. Together with Professor Pamela Cone of Azusa Pacific University in California, Giske recently published a textbook on spiritual care.

- ‘How much nursing students learn about spiritual care varies considerably depending on the individual. In order for nurses to learn how to have professional conversations with patients and families with different life stances, they first need to learn to know themselves. It will then be easier to open up to others, to adopt a whole-patient understanding and to recognize when the patient has a need to talk about existential issues,’ she says.

An analysis of 385 nursing students’ reflection papers showed that this was outside most students’ comfort zone.

Download all the presentations from the Spiritual Care conference