Programs of Spiritual Self-Care of Nurses in Iran and other Countries:  A Narrative Review

Spiritual self-care has played an important role in adapting nurses to stressful professional conditions, but has often been neglected by health systems.

The purpose of this study is to investigate spiritual self-care programs of nurses in Iran and other countries.

The present study is a narrative review and by searching the Persian and English databases, PubMed, SID, Iran doc, Magiran and a manual search in Google Scholar using the keywords nurse, health workers, spiritual self-care, self-care, spiritual health and health policy was done without time limit (until 2022). In total, out of 35309 articles obtained according to the inclusion criteria, 33 related articles were included in the study.

Despite the special place of spirituality in nursing, the implementation of spiritual self-care in nurses with individual barriers (lack of understanding of the concept of self-care and lack of evaluation, lack of motivation, ignorance of spiritual needs and misconception of spirituality) and organizational (selfish selfishness as a subset Nursing culture is associated with high workload with low salaries, lack of attention and planning of officials in this field. Health policymakers in countries such as the United States, Japan, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and Lebanon by implementing strategies such as developing national programs, forming associations and training programs and creating a requirement in self-care through ethical codes to raise the level of Nurses' spiritual self-care has helped. However, no program in this field is currently being implemented in Iran and no study has been found in this field.

It is suggested that health policymakers in Iran, by modeling the programs of leading countries in the field of spiritual self-care of nurses, help improve the spiritual self-care capacity of nurses.