Spirituality in nursing practice

Spirituality is an important aspect of holistic care which is frequently overlooked owing to difficulty conceptualising spirituality and confusion about how to integrate it into nursing care. This article seeks to understand what is meant by spirituality and spiritually competent practice, it explores some of the attitudes towards spirituality and describes some of issues affecting integration of spirituality into nursing care

Psychotherapeutic approaches to the elderly: Part Two

It is not easy to come to terms with retirement, failing bodily functions, increased vulnerability, potential institutionalisation and inevitable death. For some this is a stage of life tinged with difficult memories of being cared for when they were younger. It is not uncommon to see some older adults with a past history of childhood trauma and adversity develop new onset relationship problems having lost the containment of a career or a loved one. Older people can derive huge benefit from psychotherapeutic approaches. Personal transformation may enable them to go on to enjoy meaningful and fruitful old and new relationships whether in the community or in a care home

Why are Spiritual Aspects of Care so hard to Address in Nursing Education?’ A Literature Review (1993-2015)

Difficulties persist in conceptualising spiritual needs and understanding their relationship to religious needs and relevance to wellbeing. This review was undertaken to clarify some of these issues. It set out to establish what is already known about how issues of spiritual assessment and care are addressed in undergraduate nursing education. Using a systematic approach, a literature review covering the period 1993-2015 was undertaken. Reviewed materials were collected from mainly online sources including with searches conducted using CINHAL, SUMMON and PubMed databases, after defining keywords and inclusion and exclusion criteria. The study found that Spirituality appears to be a broad but useful category which is concerned with how people experience meaning and purpose in their lives. However, it also established that here are relatively few studies focused on how spiritual care competencies could be developed in nursing students. There is also little work exploring nursing educators’ perspectives and experiences about how to develop spiritual competencies in their students. The study concludes that further research is necessary in order to bridge the gap between aspirations and practice

Similarity solutions of a Becker-Döring system with time-dependent monomer input

We formulate the Becker-Döring equations for cluster growth in the presence of a time-dependent source of monomer input. In the case of size-independent aggregation and ragmentation rate coefficients we find similarity solutions which are approached in the large time limit. The form of the solutions depends on the rate of monomer input and whether fragmentation is present in the model; four distinct types of solution are found

Nonlinear breathing modes at a defect

Recent molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of Cubero et al (1999) of a DNA duplex containing the 'rogue' base difluorotoluene (F) in place of a thymine (T) base show that breathing events can occur on the nanosecond timescale, whereas breathing events in a normal DNA duplex take place on the microsecond timescale. The main aim of this paper is to analyse a nonlinear Klein-Gordon lattice model of the DNA duplex including both nonlinear interactions between opposing bases and a defect in the interaction at one lattice site; each of which can cause localisation of energy. Solutions for a breather mode either side of the defect are derived using multiple-scales asymptotics and are pieced together across the defect to form a solution which includes the effects of the nonlinearity and the defect. We consider defects in the inter-chain interactions and in the along chain interactions. In most cases we find in-phase breather modes and/or out-of-phase breather modes, with one case displaying a shifted mode

Exact solutions for cluster-growth kinetics with evolving size and shape profiles

In this paper we construct a model for the simultaneous compaction by which clusters are restructured, and growth of clusters by pairwise coagulation. The model has the form of a multicomponent aggregation problem in which the components are cluster mass and cluster diameter. Following suitable approximations, exact explicit solutions are derived which may be useful for the verification of simulations of such systems. Numerical simulations are presented to illustrate typical behaviour and to show the accuracy of approximations made in deriving the model. The solutions are then simplified using asymptotic techniques to show the relevant timescales of the kinetic processes and elucidate the shape of the cluster distribution functions at large times