Journal of Palliative Care & Medicine
Open Access

Review Article

Factors Related to Spirituality for Terminally ill Cancer Patients through Life Review Interview in Japan

¹Faculty of Nursing, St Mary’s College, Tsubukuhonmachi 422, Kurume City, Fukuoka, Japan

²Department of Palliative and Supportive Care, Palliative Care Team and Seirei Hospice, Seirei Mikatahara Hospital, Shizuoka, Japan

*Corresponding Author:

Michiyo Ando
Faculty of Nursing, St. Mary’s College
Kurume City, Fukuoka, Japan
Tel: +81-942-50-0744
E-mail: andou@st-mary.ac.jp

Received date:May 11, 2012; Accepted date: June 16, 2012; Published date: June 18, 2012

Citation: Ando M, Morita BT (2012) Factors Related to Spirituality for Terminally ill Cancer Patients through Life Review Interview in Japan. J Palliative Care Med S1:002. doi: 10.4172/2165-7386.S1-002

Copyright: © 2012 Ando M, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Terminally ill cancer patients feel spiritual pain such as loss of meaning to live or existence, and one of the psychological cares is life review interview. Life review seems to be useful to integrate patients’ lives and we conducted a series of life review studies. The present study proposes factors related with spirituality through our previous life review studies. Firstly we conducted both the Structured Life Review in which there were about 4 session times for a terminally ill cancer patient individually and identified some factors which improved patients’ spirituality by a text mining of PC software. Secondary, we conducted the Short-Term Life Review in which there were 2 session times for them to complete this therapy, and patients’ narrative were analyzed by the same way. By considering positive effective factors with non-positive effective factors, we observed the following four dimensions. Good human relationships vs. Bad human relationships; 2) Good memories and life satisfaction vs. Bad memories and poor life satisfaction (including attainments or self-confidence); 3) Pleasure in the past and Daily Activities vs. Confrontation of practical problems (including worries about future); and 4) Integrative life review style vs. Non-integrative life review style. These dimensions appear to be more predictive factors about the efficacy of spiritual wellbeing in terminal cancer patients, particularly after life review is conducted.

Keywords