Faith-based nursing integrates spirituality and nursing to provide a thoughtful and caring approach to patient care. Along with administering medications and bandaging wounds, you may consider how to compassionately serve your neighbor as a nurse. Christian nursing provides meaning and purpose, fills patients with hope, and offers values alignment.
Faith-based nursing is nursing with a higher calling in mind. It integrates the values and principles of the Christian faith into everyday nursing tasks, promoting compassion, empathy, and servant leadership. If you’re interested in infusing your faith into your nursing career, consider earning your nursing degree at Concordia University Texas.
The Accelerated Bachelor of Science in Nursing (ABSN) track at Concordia University Texas is committed to educating students to become excellent nurses and spiritual caregivers who practice with compassion and respect for the dignity of their patients. You could earn a Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) in as few as 16 months after completing any needed prerequisites and quickly transition into a nursing career.
As you consider your options for merging your faith with your career, it’s worth taking a deeper dive into what Christian nursing is, its main benefits, and the fundamental values it draws on.
What Is Christian Nursing?
Faith-based nursing takes a holistic approach to patient care by combining physical and spiritual care. If patients practice a faith and are open to Christian nursing, nurses may openly apply faith-based principles and share their faith with patients.
This approach to nursing acknowledges patients’ spirituality and seeks to help patients lean on their faith to cope with difficult medical issues. Even when RNs do not openly discuss their faith with patients who would not welcome it, these RNs may still apply the values of their faith to their nursing care in ways that are compliant with standard and evidence-based nursing practices.
Benefits of Faith-Based Nursing
There are numerous benefits of integrating faith with nursing practice, both for nurses and for patients.
1. Holistic Approach
Nurses take a holistic approach to healthcare, providing patients with physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional support. Nursing is much more than just medications and treatments. When you master the art of nursing and care for patients’ spirituality, you can positively influence patients and better support them.
Nursing opens up a world of possibilities. Consider these 10 reasons to become a nurse.
2. Value Alignment
Another benefit of faith-based nursing is aligning work with your values. If service, compassion, patience, honesty, and faith are important to you, you’ll appreciate integrating these values directly into what you do every day.
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3. Purpose and Meaning
As a nurse, you’ll serve your community and help others daily. With every shift you work, you can step forward into your spiritual purpose and find joy in the mission of caring for the health of your patients.
4. Hope for Patients
You’ll encounter many opportunities to celebrate with patients as they heal and recover from illness and surgery. You will also experience grief and sadness. You’ll need to comfort patients and families experiencing grief because of an unfortunate diagnosis or the death of a loved one, and it can be helpful to do so from a spiritual background when patients share your faith.
6 Fundamental Values of Faith-Based Nursing
Christian nursing draws upon the teachings of Christ, including these fundamental values:
1. Acceptance
Acceptance requires us to put aside our personal biases. As a nurse, you’re going to meet people from all walks of life. Some will have beliefs and values that are very different from your own, and they may have opinions you strongly disagree with.
All of this is irrelevant to nurses' responsibility to care for and honor the dignity and worth of all people, regardless of differences.
2. Compassion
Central to Christ’s teachings is compassion. For a patient, just knowing that someone cares about and believes in you can mean the difference between giving up or choosing to remain positive and fight on.
For busy nurses, it can be easy to focus only on the task at hand; however, compassion is needed more so than ever in these moments. Make time to get to know your patients, treat them and their families as you’d want to be treated, and provide them the care you’d wish to receive.
3. Empathy
Like compassion, empathy in nursing plays a critical role in patient outcomes. Empathy requires nurses to put themselves in their patients’ shoes. Demonstrate to patients that you care about them and validate their experiences. Remember that we are all knowledgeable about different things, have different thresholds for pain, and react differently to stress.
4. Patience
All nurses need patience, which is also one of the fundamental values of Christian nursing. Expect to have some difficult patients and family members who may be argumentative. Expect to educate patients with poor health literacy who may struggle to understand health science. Strive to always remain calm, compassionate, and patient.
5. Forgiveness
There may be times when patients say things that are unkind. They may be angry. Their medications or medical conditions might cause them to act in ways that are unlike them. Whatever the case, it will be very tough to leave your stress at work, much less deal with disrespectful patients, if you are unable to forgive.
6. Nonjudgmental
Cultivating a nonjudgmental mindset is crucial for healthcare providers. As the noted American pastor, theologian, and author Greg Boyd puts it, “The Christian’s job is to agree with God that every person you meet was worth Jesus dying for.” Beliefs aside, this just makes sense from a healthcare provider’s standpoint.
Judgment can lead nurses into dangerous territory. You will treat patients whose conditions are the result of what you may consider poor decisions or have beliefs, values, and lifestyles that are different from your own. None of these makes a patient any less deserving of caring, compassionate treatment.
How Does Our ABSN Incorporate Faith?
A nursing program that incorporates faith-based nursing in the curriculum allows you to grow in your faith while learning the skills you need to become a compassionate and skilled nurse.
The ABSN track at Concordia University Texas incorporates faith-based values throughout the curriculum. During nursing labs and clinical rotations, you’ll learn technical skills as well as spiritual and emotional care for patients.
We’ll teach you how to live out your values as you care for patients. Throughout the nursing curriculum, you’ll learn how to become a servant leader who works toward making a positive impact on others.
Want to know more about the ABSN track? Here’s what to expect in nursing school.
Explore Faith-Integrated Nursing at Concordia University Texas
Now that you know the advantages and principles of Christian nursing, it’s time to explore the Concordia University Texas ABSN track.
This accelerated nursing track is designed for students with a non-nursing bachelor’s degree or at least 60 non-nursing college credits. By leveraging your past college experience, you can earn your BSN in as few as 16 months upon successful completion of any needed prerequisites.
Our hybrid learning model incorporates online nursing coursework, hands-on skills and simulation labs, and clinical rotations in and around Dallas and Austin, Texas. With two ABSN locations and three start dates per year, you can begin nursing school when and where it works for you.
Contact our admissions counselors to learn more about nursing school admissions. Begin the path to a BSN at our Christ-centered school today.