Nursing Student's Spiritual Well-Being and Their Perspectives Towards Spirituality and Spiritual Care Perspectives

In Holistic Nursing, human being is a complex multidimensional creature. Spiritual dimension is the most prominent aspect of human being, which affects individual's health. Therefore, it seems that providing spiritual focused-care is an important domain of nursing performance. The purpose of this study was to determine and to compare, the perspectives of the first and fourth year baccalaureate nursing student regarding spiritual well being and spirtual care. The design was a comparative study, and the data collection instruments, were Spiritual Well-Being (SWB), Spiritual Perspective Scale (SPS) and Nursing Spiritual Care Perspective Scale (NSCPS). From 350 students of first and fourth year of Nursing Schools of Iran, Tehran and Shahidbeheshti universities, 283 students participated in the study. The results showed that, there were not any significant differences between the two groups considering their spiritual well-being. In other words, 98.8% of the first year and 100% of the fourth year students were in the group of moderate spiritual well-being. Besides, the mean and standard deviation of spiritual scores were 4.45 (0.65) and 4.33 (0.76) for the first and fourth year students respectively, which was not statistically significant. Although fourth year students had been involved in a 4-year nursing education curriculla, their scores of spirituality were the same as the first year students. So, the researchers strongly suggest that the revisions of the curriculum may be necessary in a way to investigate the spiritual aspect of life with nursing education programs. Further studies need to be undertaken to gain more insights into longitudinal investigations and the use of new tools as data collection instruments, especially suitable to Iranian Culture. Other studies is recommended to evaluate the effect of education on spiritual development in students.