The Effect of Spiritual Care Education on Nurses' Empathy and Professional Commitment

Educating nurses about spiritual principles and values helps to have a deeper understanding of problems and increases the quality-of-care delivery. However, the issue of spirituality is not included in the educational content. The purpose of this study was to the effect of spiritual care training on the empathy and professional commitment of nurses at Bam University of Medical Sciences.

This was a quasi-experimental study with a two-group pretest-posttest design. The research sample consisted of 80 nurses from different wards of Pasteur Hospital affiliated to Bam University of Medical Sciences were divided into two groups of intervention and control using a simple random sampling. Spiritual care training program in the intervention group was held as a 2-session webinar. The questionnaire used included the Jefferson Standard Empathy Questionnaire, the Kleikman and Henning Professional Commitment Questionnaire, and the Demographic Information Form.

The results showed a significant difference between the mean scores of professional commitments before (33.11 ± 0.32) and after (65.43 ± 0.28) the intervention and also the empathy variable before (53.41 ± 0.21) and after (78.83 ± 0.25) of the intervention in the experimental group (P<0.05). This difference was not observed in the scores before and after the intervention in the control group. Also, there was no significant difference between the mean scores of professional commitment and empathy of the subjects before the intervention (P>0.05) while there was a significant difference between the mean scores of professional commitment and empathy of the two groups after the intervention (P<0.05), which indicated that these scores improved due to the intervention.

According to the results of this study, it is suggested that the spiritual care training program should be inserted in-service training programs or nurses' curriculum content to promote nursing professional commitment and empathy.