Educational context, evidence and exploration of professional fields of nursing and midwifery

This chapter sets the scene for the chapters that follow. There is an expectation that nurses and midwives will provide spiritual care as part of their wider holistic care remit. This expectation comes from healthcare policy makers, and from nursing and midwifery regulatory and professional bodies. Patients and carers value spiritual care but it is not always provided, even although spiritual wellbeing has been associated with better health outcomes. Nurses and midwives see spiritual care as an important part of their everyday practice, but they do not feel prepared and want more education. A programme of research and a European project (The EPICC Project) spanning 9 years (2010-2019) responded to these gaps by 1) developing a set of core spiritual care competencies for assessing students (EPICC Spiritual Care Education Standard), 2) identifying what helps students to become competent in spiritual care (EPICC Gold Standard Matrix), 3) providing activities to support learning (EPICC Toolkit), all freely available on a website (www.epicc-project.eu). It is hoped that educators will join the EPICC Network to share their expertise and to report on the usefulness of the aforementioned outputs in establishing best practice in undergraduate nurse/midwifery spiritual care education across Europe and beyond.