This article provides guidance for nurses when a person’s faith is at odds with expected rehabilitation outcomes. This article explores how nurses can assist patients and their families who believe that the reason for the disability is that god is punishing them. The first strategy is always encouraging the patient and family to express their feelings, as this may be healing. Nurses can work with the patient or family’s spiritual leader to assist them to resolve these feelings. Guidance is provided for nurses to meet the spiritual needs of patients by helping patients to see God as “friend, companion, and guide.” When nurses address spiritual needs of our rehabilitation patients and their families, nurses are truly providing holistic care.

The Center for Disease Control (2010) found that 9.8% of African American adolescents reported having a suicide plan compared to 10.9% of all youth surveyed. Hope emerged as a caring construct in a study of african american adolescent gang members and may be a factor in the prevention of depression and suicide. Before age 12, adolescents were hopeful about their future, but shortly after their thirteenth birthday, they expressed feelings of hopelessness and despair. Interventions for promoting health and well-being in African American gang members include nonjudgmental listening, forming age-specific support groups, and offering strategies for achieving life goals.

The commitment to caring is an essential component of a nursing program through the implementation of Caring Groups. The purpose is to create a context for experiencing and learning caring. An interpretive phenomenological approach was used to describe the experiences of students participating in Caring Groups. The findings support this strategy as an opportunity for students to learn caring through sharing personal experiences, growing in self-awareness and self-care, building relationships, and being part of a team. The findings will inform the further development of Caring Groups and guide other educational programs in implementing this strategy.

An assignment for beginning nursing students provides the milieu for reflection on a nursing situation, appreciation of a caring relationship between the nurse and nursed, and expression of the caring through an aesthetic project. Each student represented a unique situation on a square, and the squares were sewn together to form a quilt. The quilt is apprehended as a whole but closer scrutiny reveals squares of many colors that have been sewn together. The distinct squares represent the work of students and teachers on a journey of understanding. Each of the squares reveals a unique story of caring from nursing practice. The aesthetic project provides the opportunity for the individual and collective experience of caring as the students share their stories of caring with each other and the larger community of nurses.

In this prospective, descriptive study, our organization applied the Watson Caritas Patient Score (WCPS) to a random sample of medical–surgical and rehabilitation patients. Over 2 years, mean WCPS ranged from 6.43 to 6.72 on a 7-point scale. A statistically significant improvement (p = .005) in mean caring scores occurred over the first year. In the second year, there was a statistically significant increase (p≤ .05) in the percentage of patients who gave the maximum score of 7. These results suggest that health care organizations that embed human caring philosophy into their culture can affect patient perceptions of caring.