The Impact of Lament Rituals on the Spiritual Wellbeing of Medical Staff in the Health Care Environment

Abstract

Lament rituals are a powerful tool for healing the spirit and a very human means of touching the emotion. This research project seeks to establish the value of lament rituals to promote self-awareness and grief expression for medical staff as they serve patients in Palliative Care, Intensive Care and Emergency Rooms, by witnessing and experiencing the provision of lament rituals to medical professional staff by spiritual care practitioners. Spirituality provides a safe space for medical professional staff to explore their own sources of hope while confronting illness in the journey of life. These approaches for spiritual care provision are promoted through lament rituals, contextualized for restoration of health expressed psychologically, verbally, musically, and metaphorically. Activities associated with lament include expressions of questioning and loss, individually or within a supportive community. These may be set within rituals of spontaneous creation when the circumstances may require something new and invented on the spur of the moment. A focus group composed of twelve members consisting of physicians, nurses, social workers, recreationists and chaplains were involved in an engaged conversation about the subject. Two surveys were used to measure the impact of lament rituals on the professional medical staff. The researcher used the phenomenological-narrative approach, which is interested in "lived experience" and the stories people told as a way of explaining personal and social experience. The positive results of this project have potential for use in the health care environment in teaching future spiritual care practitioners. Additional benefits may potentially be realized by the professional medical staff as they apply lament rituals to promote self-awareness and grief expression in their respective healthcare units.