The impact of special wards nursing spiritual well-being upon patient's spiritual care

Spiritual aspect has played a significant role in patient’s well being and quality of life. Acquiring patient’s spiritual needs is considered as an essential element in medical care. Therefore, it seems very logical that there is a professional requirement for nurses to achieve competence in the delivery of spiritual care. The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of nursing spiritual well-being on patient spiritual care. The cross-sectional descriptive-analytical study had been conducted to determine the impact of nursing spiritual well-being on patient spiritual care. Two standard questionnaires- Basic Psychological Needs Questionnaire by Emmons and Paloutzian and Spiritual Care Competence Scale by Van Leeuwen et al- were used. The spiritual health questionnaires were distributed between 210 nurses of special wards (response rate, 90%) and the spiritual care questionnaires were completed by researchers for evaluating nurses’ spiritual care of 567 patients during their hospitalization period (from September to February in 2014). Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze the data. Most participants were women, ranging in age from 26 to 30 year old. Participant's clinical experience was upper 5 years (41%). 59.2 percent of the nurses have Spiritual health scores in Medium level and 40.8 per cent were high. In relation to the spiritual health nurses provided 5.8% of spiritual care in poor, 53.4% optimal level and 39.8% in the highly desirable. There are significant relations between the average scores of spiritual health and age (P<0.04), clinical experience and spiritual health (P<0.02), education and spiritual health (P<0.03) and education and spiritual care (P<0.02). Overall, a significant relationship observed between spiritual health and spiritual care (P<0.01). This study found that most participants were able to meet the spiritual needs of patients; however, some of the nurses cannot. Whereas, there is a positive relationship between spiritual health and spiritual care, providing workshops and training in spiritual care for improving the ability of nurses in catering to the spiritual needs of patients could be of benefit.