The author identifies challenges of providing spiritual care in critical care settings, explains how the elements of the AACN Synergy Model for Patient Care address spirituality, and recommends nursing interventions based on the Synergy Model that are targeted to critically ill patients’ spiritual needs.

A resurgence of interest in spirituality is evident in postmodern culture.1 This interest has not been limited to popular culture alone; scientific interest in the effects of spirituality and religion on health has been gaining momentum since the 1980s. A search of the term “spiritual care” in the CINAHL database yielded only 293 articles for the period 1982 to 1994, and 1106 articles for the period 1995 to 2005. Taylor2 reported that a mid-2004 search of PubMed yielded 202 clinical trials in which religion was a study variable, 30000 articles on religion, and 1500 articles on spirituality and that more than 12 nursing textbooks...

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