The effect of prayer on spiritual health: A review study

Spiritual health is the core of... Prayer reduces anxiety and promotes spirituality and is a good way to adapt to illness. Unfortunately, spiritual health is less considered by nurses in providing care. Since various studies have been conducted on the effect of prayer on the spiritual health of different patients. The aim of this study was to summarize and review the effect of prayer on patientschr('39') spiritual health.

The present conceptual review study was conducted in 1399. To obtain selected articles for analysis, internal databases of SID, MAGIRAN, GOOGLE SCHOLAR with a combination of keywords prayer, spiritual health from 2001 to 1399 were searched. Inclusion criteria in this study included articles that dealt with prayer and spiritual health, articles in Persian and original research. Exclusion criteria also included articles whose full text was not available.

The results showed that five descriptive studies and two quasi-experimental studies in the field of prayer on patientschr('39') spiritual health have been performed. In general, research has been done on the effect of prayer on the spiritual health of chronic diseases such as cancer, hemodialysis, chronic heart failure and cerebrovascular disease.

Prayer is considered as an important factor in the spiritual health of chronic patients. Since nurses, as a professional group, accompany the patient during the patientchr('39')s hospitalization and stay in the hospital, the nurses increase the spiritual and general health of the patients by providing nursing support and meeting the spiritual need.