The spiritual questions arise at night, after family members have headed home and doctors have finished rounds. The patient, alone in the dark with his illness or injury, reaches out for comfort.
Nurses, inevitably, are the ones who hear the whispered questions: "Why is this happening to me? What does it all mean?"
Darla Ura, a clinical associate professor at Emory's Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing, believes nurses need the tools to answer the inquiries and treat a patient's mind and soul as well as body. Ura and Karen Scheib, a professor in Emory's Candler School of Theology, have teamed up to create a specialty program for nursing and theology master's students that explores the intersection of spirituality and nursing.
Although a few other university programs focus on the relationship between religion and medicine, Ura said the Emory program is believed to be the first collaboration of its kind between nursing and theology schools.
"Healing is not just about the latest technology or medicine," Ura said. "It's about treating the whole person."
Ura said the new program is, in part, a response to the renewed focus on faith and spirituality in the last 10 years. No longer a taboo topic in hospitals or other health care arenas, religion is playing a more important role in overall care, Ura said.
The program, in its pilot phase last fall, brings together nursing, public health and theology students in interdisciplinary courses on faith and health.The students also take elective courses and complete field work.
Cheri Mullen, 27, an Emory nursing student, said she plans to sign up for the specialization in the spring. As a certified yoga instructor, Mullen said she is used to helping people tune into their minds, bodies and spirits. As a nurse in Emory Hospital's neurology department, she says it's a little more difficult.
When questions about God or spirituality come up, "we're not exactly sure how to handle it," she said. "I think this oncentration will help guide me."
Yolanda Pearison, a divinity master's student in Emory's theology school who is earning a faith and health specialty, said the roles of chaplain and nurse often overlap as patients and their family members try to make sense of illness. Pearison shadowed a chaplain at Emory's Wesley Woods nursing home and geriatric hospital as part of her program and said nderstanding the faith tradition of the patient is key.
"This is not about imposing your own faith," she said. "It's about helping the spiritual as well as the physical."