Faith and Spirituality - Palliative Cares and Life Quality for Cancer Patients: Information Archeology with Statistics Table as from a Systematic Review

Abstract

Background: The faith and spirituality in palliative cares started to be used in medical community in the last decade of the XX century. The faith is known as a synonym of trust and hope being considered a positive emotion which helps the individual to enlarge tolerance, moral, growing creativity and building of new expectations. And the spirituality is related to psychological experiences of religiousness, associated individual idea. Such themes are inserted in the assistance to the palliative cancer patient.

Objective: Evaluate current evidences related to faith themes and spirituality when used in palliative cares and its effects facing the life quality of these patients, aiming to systematize them. Method: talks about a systematic qualitative review of faith and spirituality themes, whereas makes it possible to summarize researches already concluded and obtain conclusions from a theme of interest. The clinical research question, which was built through PICOS strategies, was “How can the faith and spirituality facilitate situations which promote life quality to patients who are experiencing palliative care?†The bibliographic search occurred in February/2015, in PubMed/MEDLINE and Scopus databases, using indexed papers from January 2002 to December 2014. Results and discussion: 319 articles were obtained, being 67 eligible articles for final phase. The data was extracted in a standardized way, through a table of characterization and addressed to five categories, the current study pointed a scientific contribution as from faith and spirituality themes from the emotions anatomy knowledge covering how the authors could work with patients’ positive emotions starting from faith and spirituality communication, such themes which permeated all categories worked in this study considering at a time an improvement of physiological and psychological symptoms, of immunologic and social relations during the palliative treatment.

[Conclusion]: the studies involved in this review refer to the human factor which is related directly to the patient care, in special health teams, needs to be trained to deal with care concepts about the patient faith and spirituality. Therefore, trainings are needed for these professionals enabling them to deal with this so fragile population which requires therapeutic techniques well applied and respect for each one’s individuality.