Faith Community Nursing, also known as Parish Nursing, is a specialized practice of professional nursing that focuses on the intentional care of the spirit as part of the process of promoting wholistic health and preventing or minimizing illness. This practice is guided by the following general principles:
- Effective healthcare requires more than medical treatment of
disease or illness.
- Promotion of health and healing are part of the mission and
service of a faith community to its members.
- Wellness and wholeness can only fully be achieved when we acknowledge the close connection between body, mind and spirit.
FCNs focus on helping the patient (which can be an individual, family or the entire congregation) to achieve health, healing, and wholeness by implementing health promotion and disease prevention practices. They must be caring, spiritually mature people who reach out to comfort, console, strengthen, teach and encourage the faith community. They must have: good communication skills; the ability to work with others within the congregation and the larger community; a demonstrated
relationship with a faith community; and the time and desire to implement a health ministry program
within their faith community.
Their practice focuses on these traditional FCN roles:
- Integrator of Faith and Health
- Health Educator
- Personal Health Counselor
- Referral Agent
- Trainer of Volunteers
- Developer of Support Groups
- Health Advocate/Health Care Navigator
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