Barriers to Provide Patients Admitted to Hospitals in Kashan with Spiritual Care: Nurse's Viewpoints

Background and Aim: Spiritual care is an essential part of holistic nursing care. The present study, therefore, aimed to determine the barriers to provide patients admitted to hospitals in Kashan with spiritual care from the viewpoint of the nurses.
Materials and This cross-sectional study was carried out on 306 nurses working at hospital affiliated with Kashan University of Medical Sciences in 2015. Quota sampling was chosen to select the participants. The data collection instr ument was a researcher - made questionnaire designed through library research and reviewing various articles. Running descriptive and inferential statistics in SPSS version 16 statistical software, the data were analyzed.
Ethical Considerations: After explai ning the purpose and the nature of the research to all the participants, their informed consent was obtained. The questionnaires were anonymous and the participants were assured that their personal information will remain confidential.
Findings: In the nur ses’ point of view, the major barriers to spiritual care were reported to be the lack of a sufficient number of staff to provide comprehensive care (78.1%), lack of private space for having a dialogue with the patient (70.3%), heavy workload and its relate d fatigue (67.4%), inadequate training (66.3%), dedication of more attention to the physical needs (66.3%), lack of organizational support (62.8%), insufficient time (62.7%), inability to communicate (56.9%), nurses and patients’ sexual differences (56.2%) and the belief in a better spiritual care by clerg ymen and psychologists (54.3%).
The finding s pointed to the lack of a sufficient number of staff to provide comprehensive care and the lack of private space for having a dialogue with the patie nt as the most important barriers to provide spiritual care. It is recommended that health planners take the barriers into account to provide the patients with spiritual care, adopt appropriate measures to address them in order to improve the quality of ho listic nursing care, and increase the patient and nurse satisfaction.