title: Spiritual health of oncology patients. Nurse and patient perspectives.
abstract: Although nurses describe their professional uniqueness as care of the whole person, the spiritual needs of patients often have received little attention. Therefore, this descriptive, cross-sectional survey was designed to investigate the spiritual health of oncology patients and how well oncology nurses assess spiritual health. To achieve these aims, parallel nurse (r = 0.92) and patient (r = 0.89) Spiritual Health Inventories (SHI's) were distributed to a convenience sample of 40 nurse-inpatient pairs from two hospitals. Twenty three patients with primary lung cancer and twenty seven registered nurses responded (n = 50). Analysis of SHI scores of the 21 nurse-patient pairs indicated that these nurses inaccurately assessed their patients' spiritual health (p less than 0.05), and that patient and nurse subjects preferred different spiritual caregivers. Patient respondents reported a normatively high level of spiritual health, positively related both to age (p less than 0.02) and physical well-being (p less than 0.014). Afro-American and Caucasian nurse respondents rated the spiritual health of patients higher than nurses of Asian origin (p less than 0.006).
authors.affiliation: VA Medical Center-West Los Angeles (Wadsworth Division), California.
authors.forename: M F
authors.initials: MF
authors.lastname: Highfield
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D003430:Cross-Sectional Studies; D005260:Female; D006304:Health Status; D006801:Humans; D008175:Lung Neoplasms / Q000451:nursing / Q000523:psychology*; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009730:Nursing Assessment / Q000592:standards*; D009859:Oncology Nursing / Q000592:standards*; D010327:Pastoral Care / Q000592:standards*