Cancer patient's perception of spiritual care

Spiritual care includes assistance in performing religious rituals to support those seeking connection to the spiritual world. It forms an essential part of holistic care and helps finding answers to issues concerning life, pain, and death. This study was conducted to understand cancer patient's perception of spiritual care.A qualitative content analysis approach was applied to conduct the study. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with convenience sampling of 17 cancer patients and their family members in oncology wards of a hospital in Tehran and Behnam Daheshpor Charity Organization. The recorded interviews were transcribed verbatim. For data reduction, data were labeled and coded before content analysis. The following themes were identified: characteristics and duties of nurses with a spiritual approach in religious and non religious domains, care with a spiritual approach in religious and non religious domains (emotional, communicational, functional), barriers to spiritual care.According to our findings, nurses do not satisfy all spiritual needs of the participants, because the characteristics and practices of nurses do not meet the expectations of patients and their family members, and ward environment does not support such care.