Week10- Spirituality, Planitory Health, Marginalized populations & Sexuality

Spirituality and Health in Nursing

• Illness and injury can lead to spiritual challenges and transformation, causing patients to reconsider beliefs and feel anger towards self, others, or a higher power.
• Patients facing terminal illness and nurses providing palliative and hospice care often reflect on the meaning of life and what comes after life.
• Suffering, encompassing physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual distress, is a common experience for many.
• Developing and maintaining spirituality is a lifelong process involving practices such as reflective journaling, meditation, and mindfulness.
• Spiritual well-being has been linked to decreased anxiety, depression, loneliness, and addictive behavior, as well as enhanced coping, resilience, compassion, and longevity.
• Facilitating spiritual well-being involves caring for one's own spirit and that of clients and their families, moving them toward healing and away from suffering.
• Support for spirituality is often underemphasized during life, and spiritual distress related to unmet spiritual needs is a common nursing diagnosis.
• Respecting the diversity of patients and their spiritual needs is crucial for effective care.
• The individual's worldview and personal definition of spirituality significantly inform their nursing practice.
• New nursing graduates often encounter diverse patients with varying spiritual needs in their clinical placements.
• Psychosocial bereavement counselors and religious/cultural affiliations in long-term care homes are important considerations in providing holistic care.
• Understanding cultural diversity and health care systems is crucial for providing effective care, especially in the context of the international nursing shortage.

Marginalized Populations, Health Inequities, and Intersectionality in Nursing

• Marginalized populations are those excluded from mainstream societal aspects, and are best understood in relation to social determinants of health (SDOH).
• High priority populations are those exposed to the most risk due to structural barriers of social exclusion, poor access, or dependency on others.
• Health inequities are differences in health that are unfair and created by social conditions, reflecting the unfair distribution of SDOH.
• Health disparities are differences in health status linked with social, economic, and environmental disadvantage, adversely affecting certain groups.
• Intersectionality is a theoretical perspective regarding the influence of different social characteristics, such as race, ethnicity, gender, class, and socioeconomic status, on health outcomes.
• Kimberlé Crenshaw, a civil rights advocate, discusses the urgency of intersectionality in a TED talk, emphasizing its importance in examining issues of justice and equity for marginalized populations.
• Looking upstream involves examining the root causes of vulnerability that produce poor health and affect health outcomes, rather than targeting perceived vulnerable populations or individuals.
• The concepts of health promotion, a socioenvironmental approach/SDOH, and intersectionality are important to understand in relation to one another versus in isolation.
• Sexuality encompasses sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, and sexual health, characterized by a positive and respectful approach to sexuality and sexual relationships.
• Gender identity is a person's internal and individual experience of gender, ranging from being a woman, a man, both, neither, or anywhere along the gender spectrum.
• Sexual orientation refers to the direction of one's sexual interest or attraction, covering the range of human sexuality from lesbian and gay to bisexual and straight.
• Understanding how sex, gender, and sexual orientation influence worldviews, unconscious biases, and social constructs is important for nurses in providing care and support to marginalized populations.