Overview of spiritual care instruments and its domains: a scoping review

Spiritual care in nursing involves addressing the spiritual needs of patients as part of their overall healthcare. It acknowledges that health is not just physical but also includes emotional, mental, and spiritual dimensions. Spiritual care can be particularly important during times of illness, suffering, or near the end of life when patients may seek comfort, meaning, and connection to their beliefs or faith. Integrating spiritual care in nursing and measuring spirituality and the level of spiritual care in nursing are important strategies to enhance spiritual care among nursing professionals. Nurses who have a better orientation to the concept of spiritual care would be a great resource for clients who are seeking to fulfill their own spiritual care needs. The aim of this review was to identify and synthesize the domains of standard spiritual care instruments that have been developed to measure the spiritual care provided by nurses and nursing students.

A review of the literature was carried out to examine the scales available online related to nurses and nursing students on spiritual care nursing. A total of 20 scales were encountered from the reported evidence related to spiritual care nursing and its domains. These scales are discussed under three themes. The scoping review was conducted using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidance for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) checklist.

Three major themes emerged from the identified studies that contained information related to scales of spiritual care nursing presented as intra-personal domains (spirituality nature, spirituality, religiosity, beliefs, values, knowledge, attitudes, and perspectives), interpersonal domains (spiritual care activities, spiritual support, personalized care practices, attributes of care, competencies, nurses' role and training context), and extra-personal domains (environmental factors, supportive measures, education, barriers. All three domains contained a number of important metrics that need to measure spiritual care in nursing practice.

Overall, spiritual care instruments evaluate major domains with relevant factors under three domains related to spiritual care in nursing. All scales have some different changes due to the variety of religions, cultures, and countries. Therefore, all instruments have different values and important metrics that are related to evaluating the concept of spiritual care in nursing.