Our ground-breaking research into spirituality  has identified important new knowledge on how to prepare and assess undergraduate nurses/midwives for spiritual care. 

We pioneered the first usable spiritual care competencies, identified what helps students learn and reached consensus on how spirituality and spiritual care are defined for nurse/midwifery education across Europe. 

Pre-registration nursing/midwifery students in Wales, England, Ireland, Austria, Poland, Netherlands, Norway, Malta, Portugal are now taught about spirituality using our research outputs, which is helping them to provide more person-centred care.

Our research is raising awareness of the importance of spiritual care with the UK regulatory body the NMC and amongst nurses/midwives globally; in Poland for the first time and in Brazil, China, Venezuela, USA, Canada, Kenya.

What's more, it has changed and enhanced education, policy, and practice of nursing, midwifery and other health care professions in Wales, England/UK and Europe.  

Examples of impact include

• Practising nurses in Wales, Ireland, Netherlands, Austria and England, and psychotherapists in Kenya are being taught about spiritual care using our research outputs. For example a tool designed to help nurses provide spiritual care is supporting UK organ donation teams in difficult end of life discussions with families considering organ donation. The Royal College of Nursing’s spiritual care educational resources are also being updated in light of this research evidence.

• The European Association of Palliative Care promotes a model from the EPICC Toolkit (developed by Ross and McSherry) for enabling healthcare professionals to provide spiritual care.
  
  
• The UK Board of Healthcare Chaplaincy (2020) adopts EPICCs spiritual care competencies for non-specialist spiritual care givers.
  
  
• Education policy for nursing, midwifery and allied health professionals in Wales now includes spirituality, adopting the EPICC spiritual care competencies as best evidence. This contributes to the Welsh Government's vision for Wales to become a compassionate country.