Assessment Description

What spiritual considerations surrounding a disaster can arise for individuals, communities, and health care providers? Explain your answer in the context of a natural or human caused disaster. How can a community health nurse apply the Christian worldview to the care of the individual, community, self, and colleagues during disaster management?

Emergency Preparedness And Disaster Management-Solution

Spiritual Considerations Surrounding a Disaster

Natural and artificial disasters have affected close to 200 million people worldwide (Karimi et at., 2022). Disasters such as wildfires, earthquakes, and tornadoes aggravate human suffering by increasing mortality, morbidity, property damage, and destruction of natural habitats. For instance, a natural disaster such as the super storm sandy led to disastrous and traumatic events in New Jersey State in the United States. Therefore, victims, communities and health care support need divine support to negate the effects of the disastrous events.(Spiritual Considerations Surrounding a Disaster-EssaySample)

Notably, faith-based care is essential for offering support to disaster victims. Hence, spiritual care is crucial tenet nurses and other health care professionals use to offer holistic care to affected communities. In this case, nurses should be aware of the spiritual aspects of the patients while conducting assessments, making diagnoses and treating their patients. Of importance, disasters change people physically and internally (spiritually). Spiritually, disasters can cause impending doom and hopelessness and initiate a defeatist mentality. Despair, sadness, grief and trauma render most disaster victims vulnerable and offering spiritual guidance, and holistic care is vital.(Spiritual Considerations Surrounding a Disaster-EssaySample)

Significantly, people have a divine interpretation of disastrous events as a coping mechanism. In this case, some victims believe God causes disasters to punish people for wrong deeds, as quoted in the bible. Nurses should be aware of the spiritual needs of the patients towards offering care. Again, the grief and pain encountered by the victims may cause a sense of hopelessness and desperation in the health care providers. Thus, as nurses care for traumatized patients, they should offer spiritual guidance to restore the healing and make clinical decisions based on spiritual needs.(Spiritual Considerations Surrounding a Disaster-EssaySample)

Community health nurses play an essential role in the care of disaster victims. For instance, the nurses eliminate pain, negative thoughts and stress by fulfilling their patients’ physical and spiritual needs (Zhou et al., 2018). As such, nurses reduce the incidence of depression and suicidal thoughts among the victims. Community health nurses also assess the spiritual understanding of the victims by taking spiritual history to offer the individualized care that promotes fast recovery. Nurses offer emotional care to affected communities to eliminate the risks of post-traumatic stress. They offer counselling to improve hope and resiliency among the victims. Community health care providers plan, prepare, train and offer spiritual components in their care. Therefore, a collaboration between nurses, faith-based leaders and victims plays a crucial role in building disaster-resilient communities.(Spiritual Considerations Surrounding a Disaster-EssaySample)

References

Karimi, A., Bazyar, J., Malekyan, L., & Daliri, S. (2022). Prevalence of suicidal ideation and suicide attempts after disaster and mass casualty incidents in the world: a systematic review and meta-analysis—Iranian journal of psychiatry, 17(1), 99.

Zhou, L., Wu, X., Xu, Z., & Fujita, H. (2018). Emergency decision-making for natural disasters: An overview. International journal of disaster risk reduction, 27, 567-576.