The Effects of Beliefs and Attitudes on The Attitude of Nurses Towards Dementia Patients

In this article, the researchers monitor how nurse’s attitudes are affected by their beliefs and attitudes. Conflicts arise when there are people that believe strongly about something such as religious beliefs. It also examines the proper care for dementia patients and measure the attitudes and patience of the nursing staff. Before starting it, their study involves a qualitative study design methods of eight focus group conferences with 16 nurses and 15 care workers in four Norwegian nursing homes. It focused on the inexperience of the nurses of how to deal with religious care for dementia patients.

The following three main themes imitated the nurses' and care workers' attitudes towards and accommodations of patients' expressions of religiosity and faith. Embarrassment vs. comfort which 6/16 nurses and 7/15 care workers agreed that they do not want to push religion on patients or become very cautious when talking about religion. “‘We should not only think about offering them devotion at any point just because they are demented’” The concerns of nurses and care because many people do not share the same faith and that can disturb the patients with their disease. It goes against some of their ethical code by trying to push God or whomever they may believe in.

Unknown religious practice vs. known religious practice, described as 'religious practice that was scary' or 'religious practice that was recognizable. By scary the nurses tread lightly because they felt that unaware spiritual expression from the patient could be experienced as frightening. Knowledge of the variation of patients acts through the religion prevented the nurses from realizing what was genuine and what was confusion or psychosis related to dementia. In such situations, the nurses could not understand some situations and could lose control and eventually would get frustrated and did not know how to handle the situation. Nurses were also challenged by patients’ stories about religious experiences and had to consider the disease that utters real and fantasy with their religious stories. Sometimes, the nurses would try to provide a distraction to help bring the patients back to reality by providing distractions such as changing the conversation to disrupt the chain of events that would follow if they would continue to talk about religion.

Death vs. life, described as 'difficulty talking about death 'or 'focusing on life and the quality of life'. The nurses did not want to talk about death with the patients, although the patients believed that basically did not want to live anymore because the disease has taken over and they believe they should die in a dignified way. The nurses often considered the patients’ desire to die as an expression of despair or depression. At times, the patients remained in a prolonged grief process when a fellow patient died; the nurses thought it was important to prevent this process. For this reason, nurses sometimes deliberately avoided the subject, even when they were also struggling with it. Because dementia caused many lost-experiences for the patients, the nurses wanted to focus on their quality of life. The nurses realized that the patients’ religiosity was related to maintaining important values and that quality of life was one of them. The nurses understood the concept of quality of life in terms of the experiences that patients mentally and/or spiritually care about sensory experiences.