The effect of spirituality-based educational intervention on spiritual well-being and spiritual development of nursing students.

Spiritual well-being integrates other dimensions of human health. Nursing students as future nurses should be aware of their spiritual well-being and strive for their spiritual growth and development. The aim of this study was to determine the effect of spirituality-oriented educational program on spiritual well-being and spiritual development of nursing students.

In this quasi-experimental study which was done in 2016, 50 nursing students of Khoy University of Medical Sciences were randomly selected and randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. For the experimental group, the intervention program was held in the form of four two-hour training sessions, but no intervention was performed in the control group. Data were collected using spiritual health and spiritual development questionnaires and analyzed by SPSS software using descriptive statistics and inferential tests including independent t-test and paired t-test which was considered statistically significant in case of P <0.05.

The mean age of students was 21.48 ± 1.89. There was no statistically significant difference between the experimental and control groups in the field of spiritual development and spiritual well-being before the educational intervention. After the intervention, there was a statistically significant difference in the mean score of spiritual development between the two groups (p= 0.005). However, there was no statistically significant difference in the mean score of spiritual well-being between the two groups (p> 0.05).

Implementation of a spiritual-oriented educational intervention program was able to increase the spiritual growth and development of nursing students. So, it is suggested that spirituality-based educational programs be designed and implemented in the undergraduate curriculum.