Healing Hospital: A Daring Paradigm

The spirituality in a healing hospital starts with the Chief Executive Officer and spirals downward toward management, and then the frontline employees. Healing hospitals must have a form of culture that serves the community. This includes the building, its contents, the CEO, the managers, and caregivers. This is what leads to the care that entails the spiritual mixture that takes into account a person’s whole body, which includes the mind and spirit. Healing and spirituality should be at the forefront of each patient’s stay.

CEO’s of hospitals have become money hungry Gods. The most important part of the institution has been made into cold and calculating monotonous machines. Budgets are the largest worries of most CEO, s. (67%) stated that financial challenges were their # 1 worry, quality ranked fifth (23%), and patient safety sixth (20%). Spirituality and loving care did not make the list at all. (Chapman, 2010). No wonder most people do not want their loved ones to be left alone during a hospital stay! Hospitals need to be more than just a place of physical care of robotic repair.

(Chapman, 2010). Spirituality has been shown to positively affect one’s health potential because the spirit, the mind and the body all works as one. Thus spirituality is a part of everyone’s life. Spiritual care is no longer a choice, but a professional mandate by both the profession of nursing and regulating organizations. The International Code of Ethics. , the American Nurses association and many other organizations mandate that spiritual care be included in our initial assessment of patient care planning.

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While most nurses would readily accept doing a spiritual assessment, many site inadequate educational preparation as a reason for not performing and evaluating a patient’s spiritual assessment. Other reasons cited were a lack of time and a lack of adequate spiritual assessment tools. Despite the fact that spiritual care has long been regarded as nursling’s core, research suggest that nurses do not view themselves as skilled spiritual caregivers and that they rarely care for this dimension of their practice. (Carr, 2008). The fact is that all patients are capable of receiving spiritual care.

Spiritual care is more of an attitude of care than anything else. The most critical component to creating a healing hospital is embracing a culture of radical loving care, a philosophy championed by healthcare industry leader Erie Chapman (Eberst, n. d. ). In order to create a healing hospital environment this spirituality has to be embedded in the mission of the hospital, thereby permeating the mind of the CEO, the Managers and most importantly the front line staff. Elements in supportive healthcare such as the physical environment have to be considered.

True healing environments are made up of employees that support the patient and their family to cope with the stresses of illness and hospitalization. Healing environments are free from loud noises, in-room intercoms, loud machinery that is sometimes used to clean floors and noise from the nurses at the nurse’s station. (Chapman, 2010). The challenges to creating a healing hospital environment are: environmental noises, beeping machines, paging systems, staff conversation, stretchers and floor cleaning machines.

Patient need time to sleep in order to heal properly. The overall condition of the patient’s room, the color of the walls: staring at the same four dull walls can become very depressing for someone who is ill? The condition of the equipment does everything work in the room? Does the lightning go to from bright to dim for the patients comfort level? Patients are easily frustrated when ill and making sure that all equipment is in good working condition is conducive to relieving stress. Does the thermostat allow for the patient to control the temperature of the room?

Patients are sometimes placed on medications that cause variations in their temperatures. Does the staffing limits allow for the staff to provide spiritual time for the nurse- patient load? Many nurses cite increased patient loads as a hindrance to providing spiritual care to their patients. (Healthcare staff). The benefits of creating a healing environment are improved patient satisfaction, Better patient outcomes, a decrease in employee turnover, increased scores from JACHO (Joint Commission on Accreditation of Hospital Organizations) and improved financial stability.

One can also reap the benefit of working in an environment filled with a compassionate staff (Chapman, 2010). Without CEO support the iniative of a healing hospital would be impossible. This iniative has to have deep leadership commitment. The idea of a healing hospital is different for some CEO’s due to the required rethinking of the hospital’s fundamental mission. Most CEO’s spend a tremendous amount of time hearing financial reports and business plans, and reviewing minutes from previous meetings.

Clearly all these activities have their places, but CEO’s have to start to think of their frontline staff members and not their financial reports. The medical staff is a harder task to encourage starting the use the art of loving care. Most doctors already believe they are engaged in giving loving care. In most instances the culture has to be born among employees first and then the physicians are drawn in along the way. (Chapman, 2010). Mark 2: 1-1-12 from the King‘s James version of the bible is the scripture that has been chosen to use to support the healing hospital concept.

This passage is about the teacher from Nazareth. This teacher can cure all kinds of illnesses. In those days only the rich could afford a doctor. The news of the healer spread fast. So whenever Jesus spoke, people came from miles and miles around and he healed them. He cured the blind, the deaf and the dumb. There was no illness of mind or body Jesus could not heal. There was a man who was paralyzed and was sure that Jesus could heal him. His friends carried him to where Jesus was teaching.

The crowd was so large that they could not get to him so they made a hole in the roof of the building and lowered him down in front of where he was standing. When Jesus saw how loving and caring and what faith they had, he said to the man “your sins are forgiven, so pick up your mat and go home, and to the delight of his friends he did. This biblical passage depicts faith and physical healing all in one. This is type of healing that is fostered and nurtured in a healing hospital. Healing hospitals are about the ancient bond of love at the center of healing.

As healthcare providers we have to tend to our patients whole body, which includes the human spirit. Healing hospitals provide compassionate and loving care during the time of illness, which is the type of care that people desire and deserve. (Chapman, 2010) References . . Carr, T. (2008, January 28). Mapping the processes and qualities of spiritual nursing care. Sage. Chapman, E. (2010). Radical loving care: Building the healing hospital in America. Nashville: Vaughn Printing. Eberst, L. (n. d. ). Healing hospital. Retrieved from http://www. bestcompaniesaz. com/pdf/HealingHospital. pdf