Introduction
Disaster experience may cause negative psychological and spiritual effects on personal well-being. It can be short-term and long-term distress, a sense of anxiety, and alienation. In addition, different religions address traumatic events differently: they can overcome difficulties through prayer, crying, or stoic affect (Falkner, 2018). To address these issues, spiritual considerations play an integral role. Spiritual concerns that are prevalent among disaster victims are lack of meaning, hopelessness, separation from the community, and guilt. Falkner (2018) indicates that “regardless of religious affiliation, chaplains play an important role in supporting the communities’ emotional needs during and after a devastating event” (para 50). Thus, the academic community agrees that religious people may impact the spiritual well-being of victims. The peculiarity lies in the fact that the chaplains also have the psychological skills to work with the victims, which makes their work doubly effective.
Discussion
However, community health nurses can also provide spiritual care to those affected by natural and manmade disasters. For this purpose, nurses should have specific cultural competencies to work with endangered individuals of different religions and ethnicities (Falkner, 2018). The reason is that even a single wrong word may bring severe existential anxieties to disaster victims. As for the whole community, nurses should realize how to allocate resources to assist mostly those who are unable to do it on their own. Marginalized groups who were affected by oppression before a disaster may feel higher levels of spiritual suffering than other people.
Conclusion
Lastly, the spiritual well-being of self and colleagues is also important. It can be achieved through religion and close contact with colleagues. Only spiritually healthy nurses, who have definite answers about the meaning of life, will be able to provide the highest quality spiritual assistance to others.
Reference
Falkner, A. (2018). Disaster management. In A. Falkner & S. Z. Green (Eds.), Community & public health: The future of health care. Grand Canyon University.