Nurse, midwife, lecturer, wife and mother of two Josephine Attard has graduated with a PhD degree from the University of South Wales UK.

Her thesis, ‘The design and validation of a framework of competencies in spiritual care for nurses and midwives: a modified Delphi study’, was instigated by an effort to counteract incidences of dissatisfaction in the provision of nursing and midwifery care reported in stories about clients’ suffering and their demands for a more personalised and compassionate care.

Emphasis was placed on the need for nursing and midwifery care, which reflects the core values and principles reported in the National Health Systems Strategy for Malta 2014-2020.

Competency in spiritual care incorporates knowledge, skills and attitudes of professionals to deliver care to the standards required.

Hence, formal integration of spirituality within the nursing and midwifery curriculums is recommended by research to enable competence in the delivery of holistic compassionate care.

This required the development of a rigorous and valid competency framework in spir-itual care as a guide for the achievement of competencies by nurses and midwives at the point of registration, using the Modified Delphi approach.