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Parish Nursing Expands Outside of Oklahoma City
Almost finished with a Masters in Nursing from Southern Nazarene University in Bethany, Walters has been hired for the full-time faculty in the School of Nursing at Southwestern Oklahoma State University in Weatherford. “To get a master’s, you can either write a thesis or do a capstone project,” Walters said. “When the Chair of Nursing at Southern Nazarene asked me to write and teach a program on parish nursing, I was delighted to be able to do that. I will be writing and teaching a credit-hour elective course on parish nursing, and that will be my capstone project for my master’s at Southern Nazarene. “This is a non-denominational program” in Weatherford, she said. “We will be teaching nurses how to start a parish-nursing program in their own congregation or parish, to help within each individual church.” The parish nurse is, “first of all, a registered nurse,” Walters said. “There is no ‘hands-on’ care. We are there for the educational part, and we provide holistic nursing care to the faith community. We bring back the healing ministry to the congregation.” Because of Medicare, insurance requirements, or lack of insurance, “people are going home from the hospital quicker and sicker,” Walters said. “You have public health nurses to help in the home. The parish nurses help educate the patient in how todeal with the disease. “Say two people in a congregation have diabetes, we would set up a program at the church on how to deal with diabetes. We provide confidential, professional nursing services to the church community. As health educator, we teach classes; as health counselor, we do things like making sure patients understand their hospital discharge papers [those, sometimes, difficult-to-understand instructions given to patients when they return home from the hospital]. “We are facilitators of health. We organize and get volunteers trained and ready to help with things like taking blood pressures. “We are advocates that empower individuals and family groups to get appropriate health care and to make healthy decisions. We bring back the spiritual to health care. We integrate the mind, the body, and the spirit,” Walters said. Anita Jones, a member of Epiphany parish in Oklahoma City, attended the same parish-nurse program at Our Lady of the Lake Retreat House that Walters had audited. Jones is the retired dean of Oklahoma City Community College’s nursing program and is currently a part-time nursing instructor at Langston University, northeast of Guthrie. ‘’Alveria Kopp is chairman of the Epiphany parish-nurse group,” Jones said. “We meet as a group with a common interest in parish nursing. About half of our members have been through the program, and half, have not. We’re all registered nurses. “We had a health fair last year. This year, in November, we will have another. We’ll have health screenings and health education functions, in addition to acting as a resource for the facilitation of health-care access. We will also have lectures and group participation projects,” Jones said. This year’s July training classes were “taught by Dr. Andy West, Mary Diane Steltenkamp, Caryl Prati, and several other parish-nurse mentors,” Jones said. “We learned how to integrate prayer into nursing, something I was never able to do in publicly supported facilities. Parish nursing gives me license to do just that. It frees me up. “I had the pleasure of hearing Dr. West talk about parish nursing in the past and actually began to feel it was a calling. I had periodically received literature regarding parish-nurse training, but the times were never compatible with my schedule. This time, the time simply opened up. “My training for the program was a present. My church [Epiphany] contributed to my tuition, and Catholic Charities gave me a partial scholarship. I paid the rest,” Jones said. “There were five in attendance who were new to parish nursing, and Betty Walters, who audited the program. There were two nurses from Tulsa from a Unitarian church: a psychiatric nurse and a retired nurse, and two Methodists: an ER nurse from Wagoner and a nurse on the OU College of Nursing faculty, from Elk City. I was the only one from OKC. “The things I appreciated most about the training in Guthrie were the solitude, the provision of a setting that allowed you to concentrate, and the excellent teaching. It was very informative. Dr. West and the other teachers had lots of pertinent material for us to take with us. There was also a display of publications available at the parish-nurse library, located at Catholic Charities. People made contact here to access those publications. “There was also an interesting facilitation of discussion among us, which encouraged introspection. This is critical. We need to know ourselves, our own strengths and weaknesses, in order to help patients and to grow, ourselves,” Jones said. In parish nursing, “We leam to integrate our spiritual selves [into our nursing] and to assist patients throughout their life spans-birth to death. We pray with grieving families and train new moms and pops. We teach them about parenting.” Jones hopes as a parish nurse to increase the availability of health literature at her church. “Places like the State Health Department have mounds of health information. Most of it is free. “I want to make this information available in the church where people can read about how to keep themselves healthy,” Jones said. When asked if she would recommend this program to other registered nurses, Jones said that she would, and already had. “Nurse colleagues are wanting to know when the next training will be and why I didn’t let them know about the last training session,” Jones said. “I try things before I recommend them, and I highly recommend this training to nurses.”
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