About 10,000 American churches have professional nurses who provide assistance to needy patients. The so-called parish nursing movement started in 1984 in the Chicago area and has now spread across the United States and to Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand.
Experts estimate between 7,000 and 11,000 churches and a handful of synagogues have nurses, weaving a safety net for a health care system that doesn't do a particularly good job in managing chronic disease, teaching preventive health, or supporting the home-bound elderly or the dying.
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The specifics, naturally, vary. A nurse at a church with many young families may focus on well-baby visits and helping new parents adjust. One whose congregants are elderly might focus on fall prevention or helping people tap into community services for the aging, said Alyson Breisch, who trains parish nurses at Duke University and also nurses at her own church, the United Church of Chapel Hill in North Carolina.
Church nurses attend to the whole patient—body, mind, spirit.
"Every nurse worth her salt says she takes care of the body, mind and spirit. And we are all spiritual people whether we believe in God or not," said Alvyne Rethemyer, director of the International Parish Nurse Resource Center. "Our spirituality is affected by our health, and our health is affected by our spirituality."
It is a sad fact that hospital nurses are usually stretched to the limit by staffing shortages and able to provide only the most essential care. Parish nurses fill an important gap in the health care system.
The Reuters article unfortunately repeats the misleading statistic that 47 million Americans do not have health insurance. As Mark Steyn pointed out in yesterday's column, many of the 47 million are in fact covered by Medicare while most of the rest have chosen to forego health insurance.
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