By Rev. Dorothy S. Boulware | Word In Black
Overview: Faith-based nursing is a movement within the profession that seeks to understand a patient’s sperituality and use it as the basis for healing, a philosophy Tilghman will incoporate at Coppin State University.
(WIB) – Everyone recognizes qualitative nursing when they experience it, especially since it’s often during the most troubled seasons of life: a debilitating illness, a medical emergency or an extended hospital stay. Healing, experts say, is more effective when the caregiver understands the whole person — including their faith or spirituality.
That often-overlooked aspect of medicine is even enshrined in the American Nurses Code of Ethics. Nurses, it says, provide optimal care by enabling patients “to live with as much physical, emotional, social and religious or spiritual well-being as possible” and providing care that “reflects the patient’s own values.”
Joan Sylvia Tilghman, the new dean of the College of Health Professions at Coppin State University, a historically Black college in Baltimore, is making that philosophy a cornerstone of her tenure. She believes that, in the healthcare client-provider relationship, faith should be embraced and understood from the perspective of the person on the other end of the stethoscope.
Some would call that faith-based nursing, an emerging caregiving philosophy that’s taking root at medical colleges and nursing schools nationwide. Baylor University defines it as the intentional merging of healthcare and religion for patients and families, and several studies have established the link between spirituality and health, a connection the nursing education community is leaning into.
At Vanderbilt University, for example, the School of Nursing and Center for Spiritual and Religious Life received a grant last year to support a joint curriculum. In Minnesota, Bethel University received $20 million to open a faith-based college of nursing and health science. And Interfaith America sponsors an annual fellowship for health professionals, which includes a stipend as well as professional development.
A trained nurse, military veteran, longtime educator and HBCU alumna, Tilghman was appointed dean of Coppin’s College of Health Professions in July. She wants Coppin to join that movement by encouraging nursing students to be fully mindful of the entirety of each patient — including their spiritual or religious practices — to provide the best of care.
“My PhD is in transcultural nursing which requires the consideration of the culture of everyone, whatever that culture is,” she says. “If it’s a business, if it’s a community, if it’s a religious culture, whatever it is, that’s important because it’s important to that person.”
But in her view that doesn’t mean preaching to the patient.
“The providers are not going into the doctrines of the religion or what that means,” Tilghman says. “But they’ll understand that this person has a definition or they have identified themselves as being part of this religion, this denomination, this sect.”
Since communication is key to any relationship, long or short-term, this information helps caregivers become more efficient communicators, and as such, a more efficient facilitator of the healing process.
“We teach in nursing, before you even touch a person, you have to know how to communicate with them,” Tilghman says. “You have to be able to understand them. And so faith is encouraged in the sense not to be a disciple” but understand how a patient’s faith informs celebrations, mourning, prayer and healing.
That viewpoint “is threaded throughout our undergraduate classes,” she says. “It’s threaded through when we have doctoral classes where we prepare nurses to be family nurse practitioners, where they go out and provide care.”
Tilghman comes to Coppin by way of Georgetown, South Carolina, where her mother — who always called her “Julia Sylvia Graham,” she laughs — talked faith around her, as did members of her family and their community. It was a lifestyle.
“It’s that Gullah area,” Tilghman says. “I love being from the state, warts and everything.”
Faith tinged everyday interactions: “I remember as a child that the elders would say, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow if the Lord is willing,’” she says. “Sometimes they would add, ‘if the creek don’t rise,’ because they lived on the other side of the water” and sometimes used tree trunks to cross.
In nursing, “one of the two things is the personal knowing; what you bring to the experience and how that can transfer into caring,” she says. “We also bring into it the aesthetic of nursing. Nursing is an art and a science.”
The science “is the combination of pharmacological principles, the medicine, which lends itself to treatment,” she says. “The art is understanding that people are unique and you have to care for them in that unique way.”