Spirit4Care: Strengthening Spiritual Care in Nursing Training

At the University of Luxembourg, the Nursing Sciences team in the Department of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences is working to help future nurses address the often-overlooked spiritual dimension of care as part of its Spirit4Care project.

Recently, the team organised a train-the-trainer workshop on spiritual care, welcoming eight nursing professionals from across Luxembourg. Participants represented a range of clinical settings, including home care, elderly care, palliative care and paediatric services.

The workshop aimed to prepare participants to become educators in spiritual care within their own professional environments. Following the session, the group provided training to twenty second-year Bachelor of Nursing students.  

The training was based on the EPICC competency framework, an internationally-recognised reference for spiritual care education in healthcare. In this context, spiritual care does not refer to religious care or proselytism. Rather, it focuses on supporting patients in finding meaning in their experiences, activating personal and community resources, and helping them maintain the best possible quality of life. For nurses, it often begins with a simple but essential question: What matters to you today? 

Crucially, spiritual care also involves recognising forms of moral, existential or spiritual distress—acknowledged in nursing classifications such as NANDA nursing diagnoses—and working with patients to explore ways of easing this suffering. 

Although nursing has long been described as a holistic profession that addresses the physical, psychological, social and spiritual dimensions of health, the spiritual aspect is often less clearly defined, taught or practiced in both education and clinical settings. The Spirit4Care initiative seeks to help bridge this gap by strengthening the integration of spiritual care within nursing training.

Initiatives such as the train-the-trainer session at the University of Luxembourg contribute to this effort, helping ensure that future healthcare professionals are better prepared to address the full range of patients’ needs.