Evaluation of Spiritual Health and Its Related Factors in Iranian Nurses and Nursing Students: A Narrative Review

Spiritual health is a crucial aspect of health. Spiritual health is an internal and satisfying feeling combined with constructive communication with oneself and others. It is a transcendental existence in the specific cultural framework of each society, which makes life and death meaningful. Paying attention to spiritual health can improve nursing care by nurses. Therefore, the present study was conducted to investigate spiritual health and its related factors in Iranian nurses and nursing students.

The present study was a systematic review (2022) that was conducted by searching for articles on the Web of Science, Science Direct, Scientific Information Database (SID), Scopus, Google Scholar, and PubMed databases without a time limit. The keywords were “spiritual wellbeing”, “spiritual health”, “spirituality”, “nurse”, “related factors”, and “Iran” in Persian and English sources. The articles on spiritual health and its components of quantitative study that were performed on Iranian nurses and nursing students were examined.

In 48 studies, the level of spiritual health of nurses and nursing students was moderate (In the range of 20-120). Spiritual health in the religious dimension was more than the existential dimension. Several factors, such as demographic variables, job, education, job satisfaction, spiritual care, and so on improve the level of spiritual health, and reducing factors, such as stress, anxiety, and depression improves the level of spiritual health of nurses.

Paying attention to factors, such as age, gender, marriage, educational status, job conditions, level of satisfaction, personal characteristics and psychological conditions can lead to change in spiritual health.