Spiritual health of oncology patients. Nurse and patient perspectives.

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).