A Case Report on Meeting the Spiritual Need of Intubated Conscious Patient

Nurses are showing more interest in including spiritual health to prevent and treat illnesses. For patients who can speak may ask for their spiritual need to the health care provider. But for intubated patients it.s difficult to express such needs. Most of the time caregivers focus on the physical parameters only for intubated patients. Apart from physical symptoms these patients also experience a variety of bio-psycho-socio-spiritual sensations. Research has shown that spiritual therapies can reduce distress, assist in preparing the patient for end-of life care, and enhance overall wellbeing along with improving their quality of life. The purpose of this study is to provide ground work for implementing policy in critical care unit towards religious and spiritual interventions in nursing care to promote mental, physical, and spiritual health of conscious intubated patients. In a surgical ICU, a case study was carried out on a 67 years critically ill patient on a continuous mechanical ventilation with GCS 10T, having no cognitive impairment. Although she responded negatively to all physical care, she responded fairly well to spiritual care. In order to determine the patient’s basic spiritual needs, yes-or-no questions were asked. The patient was asked whether she had anything further to say. This project offered a platform for creating a person-centred communication board in future that would cover the religious and spiritual demands of intubated patients. The activities and communication that professionals had with intubated patient using the participatory design indicate necessity to cater religious and spiritual needs to promote overall wellbeing.