Abstract
Like in other countries, in Lithuania, there are intentions to expand duties and competences of health-care staff to spiritual care provision. Still, one of the greatest challenges for Lithuanian nurses is to assess and to satisfy patients’ spiritual needs in their clinical practice due to the impersonate and private nature of these needs. This chapter presents the empirical data on the non-terminally ill cancer patients’ spiritual needs in relation to patients’ satisfaction with life and subjective feeling of happiness. The most important spiritual needs of cancer patients are related to the connectedness with family members and their assistance and support in difficult situations. Being highly religious, Lithuanian cancer patients were interested in addressing the theme of death by talking about it, praying or reading spiritual literature. Although spirituality and religion are very personal and private matters, they should be taken into account during a cancer patient’s comprehensive assessment, care planning and care implementation in hospital.
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Riklikienė, O. (2021). Spiritual Needs of Non-terminally Ill Cancer Patients from Lithuania. In: Büssing, A. (eds) Spiritual Needs in Research and Practice. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70139-0_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70139-0_11
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