Today we learnt a paper about spirituality and family nursing: spiritual assessment and interventions for families. The aim of this paper is to propose a guideline for spiritual assessment and interventions explicitly for families, while considering each family member’s unique Spirituality. The majority of published guidelines on spiritual assessment and interventions are designed predominantly for individuals. They failed to differentiate between individual and family spirituality or offered only brief discussions on family spirituality. Such guidelines are potentially problematic. They may lead nurses to focus only on individual spirituality and neglect to discern family unit spirituality or recognize the presence of conflicts in spiritual perspectives within the family. While other disciplines such as social work and family therapy had several guidelines to assess family spirituality, there is a dearth of such guidelines in the family health nursing and spirituality literature, in spite of the rhetoric about incorporating spirituality as part of total family assessment. As a beginning solution, guidelines were proposed for spiritual assessment and interventions for the family as a unit, and the category of spiritual interpretation to represent diagnosis was introduced. Case studies exemplified how to integrate the guideline, and illustrate elements that may favour specific interpretations which would guide the interventions. As nurses continually strive to assist families with their health needs, they must also attend to their spiritual needs, as one cannot truly assess a family without assessing its spirituality.

                                      ShaoPei