Spirituality health and its related factors in students of nursing and midwifery

Background and Purpose: Spiritual well-being plays an important role in the mental and physical health, and is considered as a common strategy to cope with problems. Given the importance of promoting spiritual well-being in the nursing and midwifery students, we must first determine the level of this state in this population. Regarding this, the present study aimed to examine the spiritual wellbeing and its related factors in the nursing and midwifery students of Mazandaran University of Medical Sciences, Sari, Iran.

Methods: This descriptive analytical study was conducted on 183 nursing and midwifery students studying at the Mazandaran University of Medical Sciences in 2015. The sampling was performed using the systematic random sampling technique. The research instruments included a demographic form and the Spiritual Well-Being Scale developed by Palotzian and Ellison. The data were analyzed through the SPSS version 16 using the descriptive and analytical tests, including frequency, percentage, t-test, and Pearson correlation coefficient.

Results: According to the results of the present study, the mean spiritual well-being was 69.70±11.62. In addition, the means of religious and existential well-being were 35.77±6.80 and 34.04±6.19, respectively. The results demonstrated no significant correlation between the demographic variables and spiritual well-being in the participants (P>0.05). However, spiritual well-being had a significant relationship with the religious and existential well-being (P<0.001).

Conclusion: As the findings of the present study indicated, the majority of the nursing and midwifery students had a moderate level of spiritual well-being. Furthermore, religious well-being was found to be slightly higher than the existential well-being, which could be due to the cultural issues.