This study aims to describe nurses' experiences of delivering spiritual support in a palliative care setting in the Republic of Ireland. The authors conducted semi-structured interviews with 22 nurses working in the area of specialist palliative care. A content analysis of the transcriptions revealed five sub-themes: understanding spirituality; the art of nursing in spiritual care; education and learning; the challenge of spiritual caring; and the dimensions of time. The resulting creation of a spiritual tapestry provided an overall theme. Nurses in this study were spiritually self-aware and placed a high value on the spiritual element of their caring role. Nurses described their individual understanding of spirituality and discussed how they recognized and addressed a patient's spiritual needs. Time was described as essential to the provision of spiritual support and appeared to be a significant resource challenge to the provision of spiritual care. The challenges of assessing spiritual needs and measuring outcomes of care were also reported. Participants in this study described the creation of a spiritual tapestry that 'weaves' together care and compassion with skills and knowledge in their nursing practice.

Specialist palliative care day care (SPDC) units provide an array of services to patients and their families and can increase continuity of care between inpatient and homecare settings. A multidisciplinary teamwork approach is emphasized, and different models of day care exist. Depending on the emphasis of care, the models can be social, medical, therapeutic, or mixed. We describe our experience of introducing an enhanced therapeutic specialist day care model and using both patient- and carer-rated tools to monitor patient outcomes.