Compassion, Spiritual Care and the End of Life

Doug (0:01)

Welcome back to Fifty Plus, thank you all for listening. And in this segment, we're gonna talk about an event that's set for this coming Friday, actually October 9th, at St. Paul's United Methodist Church on Main Street, down there in downtown Houston. The event is the 33rd Annual Spirituality in Nursing Conference, which also will be available online, by the way. We'll talk more about that in a little bit. Person leading this show, Marianne Florian, is on the phone with me now. Welcome to Fifty Plus, Marianne.

Marianne Florian (0:28)

Thank you so much for having me.

Doug (0:29)

It's Marianne, isn't it? I said Marianne. I'm sorry. Gosh.

Marianne Florian (0:33)

Marianne.

Doug (0:34)

Okay, I got it right now. So, let's focus on you for a minute too, Marianne, a post-doctoral fellow in religion and medicine. And I see that you kind of divide your time between UTHealth and the Institute for Spirituality and Health at Texas Med Center. No grass growing under your feet, is there?

Marianne Florian (0:50)

No, it hasn't been for a while now. It's a wonderful, it's been a wonderful experience. I've really loved working in these two institutions at McGovern Medical School and Institute for Spirituality and Health. I feel like I've gotten to learn so many new things.

Doug (1:05)

You know, for the period that I had UTHealth on as my co-presenting sponsor of the show, and I'm hoping to get them back, they had some sort of a grant issue that took some of the money away. But I feel exactly the same as you. I learned so much from talking to everybody over there. And I'm just a tad jealous that you're still over there getting all that interesting information. So 33 years for this conference, that's a very long time. Takes great people such as yourself and a very powerful message to keep things going that long. For this particular conference, what's the theme for this year's edition?

Marianne Florian (1:41)

This year's theme is spiritual care and bioethics and end of life nursing. So that end of life nursing is really the care that nurses give to people who either have a serious illness or for whatever reason, they know that they're very close to or vulnerable to the end of life.

It's a big concern for nurses because you don't just want to spend your whole career thinking you can keep everyone going forever. Of course, that would be our dream, but it's not possible. So having excellent nursing care and end of life is just as important as the excellent nursing care that preserves life. The bioethics and spiritual care pieces are two priorities. Spiritual care means giving someone both spiritual support if they have any sense of distress or worry that has to do with religion and spirituality in the end of life. It also has to do with getting them anything they need related to religion and spirituality, that access to clergy, access to chaplains, or just a welcoming and open minded presence that doesn't always need to talk and doesn't always need to offer verbal comfort, but can just be witnessing and being with people in their full humanity, no matter how long that humanity has already been going.

Doug (3:15)

Just the presence of someone such as yourself or someone who's gone through what you're going to be talking about this Friday is so comforting. I watched that when my mother's final weeks came along. She was in hospice care and this hospice person just came and sat with her. They didn't talk a lot. She couldn't talk really, but she knew that person was there. It was very evident. I saw in what Laura sent that you're expecting more than 120 nurses and other medical people for this conference. Give us an overview of what's going to be covered that day.

Marianne Florian (3:47)

Sure. As I said, we have two priorities for care and end-of-life nursing that we're addressing. One is spirituality, spiritual care, and the other is bioethics. That has to do with mitigating harm, promoting well-being, and also some of the more logistical, legal, and policy issues that can come up in end-of-life care.

We're going to start the day with a wonderful clinical ethicist, who also works for McGovern Medical School. Her name is Joelle Robertson Pridler, and she's going to work through some case studies around bioethics issues, bioethics and ethics that have to do with life, bioethics issues around end-of-life care. Then we also have a nurse attorney from the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Martha Grace Chromines. She will be discussing advanced directives. So these are legal documents that communicate a patient's care wishes near the end of life. And then we'll also have a presentation by a palliative care nurse. This is someone who's an expert in promoting someone's physical and emotional comfort near the end of life. And so that's Marvell Bartley from MD Anderson Cancer Center. And then we also have a nurse who's trained to coordinate grief support for families after the patient who they love and has been in their connection to the health care system has passed away. So Michelle Oakley is a bereavement coordinator for Memorial Herm and Children's, and she's going to walk us through the community health priority of supporting bereaved loved ones of patients after the patient has passed on. So yeah, her insights are really important.