Increasing Nurses' Spiritual Perspectives and Spiritual Care through a Spiritual Educational Program

Abstract

There are no protocols in the literature describing how spiritual care from nursing staff should be provided to a bone marrow transplant patient and their family. Although a majority of nurses think that routine spiritual care would positively impact patients, only 25% of patients have reported receiving spiritual care. Increased education has been associated with positive perceptions of spiritual care. The solution to this need will be researched through a secondary data analysis from pre/post surveys from implementation of an education program on spiritual care for BMT nurses. The hypothesis of this PI is that a spiritual education program will enhance spiritual perspectives in nurses and increase spiritually-focused nursing care with patients. The purpose of this PI is to determine if a spirituality training class for Bone Marrow Transplant nurses will increase nurses' spiritual perspectives and their spiritual care of patients. A second purpose is to examine the relationship between nurses' spiritual perspectives and extent of spiritual care at both pre- and post- educational program times. This study is a secondary analysis of a data set from a pre/post survey of BMT nurses who attended a spiritual education program. Nurses were surveyed using the SPS tool and a NSQ tool. The spiritual education program was a one day, six hour class that was taught by the research team, and divided into sessions. There were 43 BMT nurses who completed the class and the posttest one month after taking the class. The slight increase of scores from pre- to post- survey with the SPS suggests that the spiritual education program provided a slight enhancement of personal spiritual perspectives and assisted the participants to reflect and further develop their values and beliefs on spirituality. The hypothesis that a spiritual education program would increase the frequency of spiritual care that nurses provided to patients was strongly supported. These findings suggest that participating in a spiritual education program provides the nurse with information that will enable one to conduct spiritual assessments, become more comfortable developing an individualized patient spiritual care plan, and accepting that providing spiritual care is part of a nurse's job description.