Spiritual care within nursing and midwifery

In this chapter, we focus on the importance of spirituality, particularly in difficult times such as during illness and COVID-19, and the challenges that this presents for professionals such as nurses and midwives who feel unprepared for spiritual care as part of their holistic caring role. We describe how a European project “Enhancing nurses’ and midwives’ competence in Providing spiritual care through Innovative education and Compassionate Care” (EPICC Project) responded to this challenge by producing outputs that support the preparation of nurses and midwives for spiritual care namely: definitions of “spirituality” and “spiritual care”; competencies for practice; pointers for developing evidence-based education programmes, with a supporting Toolkit; and a network and website for sharing best practice. We conclude by giving examples of how the EPICC outputs are impacting healthcare education, practice and policy internationally to better prepare nurses, midwives, and more recently, other healthcare staff, to include spiritual care within their practice.