Nursing Spotlight
graduate Barbara Pesut
Wrestling with Matters of the Spirit
Last fall Barbara Pesut, RN, Ph.D., defended the UBC School of Nursing’s first doctoral dissertation based on philosophical research. Currently Associate Professor and Nursing Department Chair at Trinity Western University School of Nursing, Barb chose to do her graduate work at the UBC School of Nursing for three reasons:
“faculty, faculty, faculty,” she said.
“The scholars at UBC are international stars, and excellent mentors,” says Barb. “You become the environment you surround yourself with. Therefore, if I surround myself with good scholars, I can become one.”
As a teenager, Barb was convinced of the profound importance of the spiritual aspect of life and believes her reverence for that dimension has always been a part of her.
From her early nursing career, she recalls an interest in how this dimension of human experience blended with nursing practice. However in the 70s and early 80s, she encountered a palpable silence within the discipline with regard to the role of spirituality in health care.
“I could sense from nurses and patients this was an area of importance with regards to how they coped, but there wasn’t a lot of dialogue.”
More recently, Barb has seen a resurgence in North American society of searching for something—perhaps as a reaction to extreme scientific enquiry.
“We need to listen to patients,” Barb says, “some of them are saying ‘this is important to me and you need to include this in my health care.’”
Barb’s doctoral dissertation research, entitled, A Philosophic Analysis of the Spiritual in Nursing Literature, was co-supervised by Drs. Joy Johnson and Sally Thorne. In it, she differentiates between “spirituality” and “the spiritual.”
“I talk in terms of ‘the spiritual’ because it implies that this is a reality independent of what you or I may believe.”
She recognizes a set of characteristic assumptions that tend to be held by the nursing authors who write in this field.
“The fundamental challenge of this kind of work is being aware of one’s personal ideas of reality,” says Barb. Some may argue that the origin of the spiritual is human, others will argue divine, but with their own definition of divine.
“I wanted to step back and take a philosophic and problematic approach to the subject. I combined the tools of three philosophic categories, theism, monotheism and humanism, and used those tools to critically reread what was happening in nursing literature. With this format you can distance yourself from the issue and take a look at problems in a way that is easier to understand.”
As one embarks on such original scholarship, it is inevitable that questions and issues will arise that had not initially been imagined.
“There is the whole issue of the changing nature of spirituality in Canada and the fact that nursing is a public profession. We hold the public’s trust and therefore nurses are embedded in Canadian society.”
Barb recognizes that Canadian society today is moving toward a postmodern approach of the spiritual, with individuals feeling authentic to self as opposed to a higher power or an institution. For her, philosophical inquiry became a powerful way to deconstruct the ideas and assumptions underlying nursing’s complex relationship to the spiritual and to argue for the limits that nursing must articulate with regard to its disciplinary competence to assess or intervene within the spiritual domain.
On the basis of this research, Barb would like to see a space created in health care in which patients can feel comfortable talking about the spiritual.
“We need to be careful we don’t start creating a professional discussion that doesn’t accurately represent a patient’s needs and views,” she says. “Much of the literature today talks of the spiritual being universal, but there are some patients who don’t know what the spiritual means and there are others who may disagree with the meaning created.”
Barb feels grateful for the opportunity to have done her graduate studies at the UBC School of Nursing.
“The school made difficult decisions on what was required to be a scholar in this environment and I came out of UBC extremely well-prepared.”
For Barb, the future in this area of study holds limitless possibilities.
“We need to get theorists from the various categories around a table to tease out the similarities and differences.”
Next September, Barb plans to host a symposium of some of nursing’s most prominent spirituality scholars at a conference in Switzerland to create such a dialogue.
“We are not going to erase any distinctions,” she says, “but we are going to find the common ground.”