A Spirituality Quintessentially of the Ordinary': Non-Religious Meaning-making and Its Relevance to Primary Health Care

Abstract

Increasingly, there is a call within the literature for research to clarify the notion of spirituality, and document its relevance to health care. The research presented in this article is one response to this call. The phenomenological research involved the collection of data through open-ended interviews with twelve survivors of a haematological malignancy who were at least three years post-treatment. The results indicate that maintaining the intimate connection with life through family, home, friends, leisure, and work is just as spiritually important to individuals as meaning making (transcendent or otherwise). As a consequence, it is argued that the most important spiritual response for patients and their carers is to ensure that they are able to remain, where possible, in the comfort of their own homes surrounded by their intimate network of family and friends. The findings thus have direct implications for primary health care. Primarily, individuals do not need to talk with counsellors in an institutional setting about their intimate world outside the hospital. Rather, they need active, multi-disciplinary support to remain in their own home whenever possible. An informed spiritual response is predominantly about the provision of choice through the development of community-based health care services, from the point of diagnosis along the continuum, from cure to palliation.