This thesis offers a sustained enquiry into the perceptions and practices of GP nurses in relation to the concepts of spirituality and of spiritual care. This is an under researched constituency in relation to an emerging topic of interest across the healthcare sector. The aim of the thesis is to investigate GP nurses’ perceptions and practices in the provision of spiritual care, to identify how the context of general practice might impact their practices, and the implications of these practices for GP settings. Informed by a review of literature investigating the phenomena of spirituality and spiritual care in healthcare, this thesis employs Bhaskar’s theory of critical realism as the theoretical framework and a mixed methods methodology gathering both quantitative and qualitative data. The study drew on data from an online questionnaire to investigate GP nurses’ underlying perceptions of these concepts, and semi-structured interviews with ten GP nurses to identify their practices and experiences in the provision of spiritual care. The analysis from both data sets reflected the influence of applied critical realism on the research design. The study found that certain approaches in the provision of spiritual care were common among the GP nurses. An understanding around these values seemed to permit GP nurses to downplay any differences in spiritual care outcome values. While the GP nurses applied a common sense approach in the provision of spiritual care, the differences in outcome values disproved claims of neutrality. The thesis identifies and presents GP nurse patterns or commonalities in the provision of spiritual care and proffers five influential dimensions for practitioners and educational developers to draw upon in the professional development of GP nurses. It also evaluates these dimensions in relation to critical realism by considering where they lie within Bhaskar’s stratified domains of real, actual and empirical. This study offers three original contributions to knowledge: it is the first study to have carried out a systematic literature review of the extant literature on spiritual care in relation to GP Nursing, establishing that there is a gap in relation to spiritual care focusing solely GP nurses in the UK; the first study to gather a substantial body of primary quantitative and qualitative data on GP nurses’ perceptions and provision of spiritual care from which five influential dimensions were extrapolated to develop a model of GP nurses’ provision of spiritual care; and, the study applies Bhaskar’s theory of critical realism in healthcare research in the provision of spiritual care. The thesis concludes by indicating the potential for further research using critical realism and mixed methods in this area of educational and nursing research.
Permanent link to this resource: https://doi.org/10.24384/taty-1208
Ulett, Elaine
Supervisors: Dalrymple, Roger ; Butcher, Dan Other contributors: Carpenter, Barry
School of EducationFaculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Year: 2021
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