When a family’s faith in healing clashes with the pressures of a busy hospital ward

Image: McClain Moore for AJN/all rights reserved.

What happens when a family with strong religious faith is decided to proceed to hope for the healing of a young father, even after he dies of an incurable brain tumor within the intensive care unit? The room is required by other patients; a nursing student and her teacher cared for a patient within the last hours of his life and are actually expected to offer post-mortem care.

It’s a difficult, somewhat tense situation, and the initial reactions of nurses within the hospital vary. Melody Sumter, this month’s creator Reflections (“A Place of Faith: My First Experience of Cultural Competence in Nursing“), was a nursing student assigned to a patient who left behind a young wife and a 10-month-old child.

Recalling this event, Sumter recalls her compassion and joy on the time when she learned that the nursing staff had finally found a method to honor the patient’s family’s wishes in addition to their responsibilities to other patients. Sutter writes:

Seeing this family practicing their faith was encouraging for a young nursing student like me – as was the nursing staff’s acceptance and support of a belief that almost all of them didn’t understand.

The creator herself is an individual of strong faith. He quickly draws the reader into the events and captures the intensity of the situation through vivid detail and a balanced perspective. Each reader will read this story in a different way. For Sumter, the experience was ultimately encouraging and helped her realize that her work as a nurse and her personal faith didn’t need to be at odds.

(In a separate post published last week on this blog, Sumter provides a unique perspective on the role of non secular faith in her life as a nurse, this time addressing her years of scuffling with a debilitating, sometimes debilitating chronic disease, her efforts to return to work as a nurse at bedside and the insights she gained about what it’s prefer to be a patient).