Factors that Facilitate or Hamper Oncology Nurse's Delivery of Spiritual Care in China: A Qualitative Study

To explore the factors that facilitate or hamper the delivery of spiritual care by oncology nurses and advance their ability to deliver spiritual care, a qualitative design using semistructured interviews was used to collect data that were then analyzed using content analysis. Recruitment was purposive. Fifteen nurses at a cancer treatment hospital in a single Chinese province were recruited via voluntary sign-up; nine had received spiritual training and six had not. Digitally audio recorded, semistructured interviews lasting about 30 min were conducted in May 2023. Inductive thematic analysis was used to analyze the data. Ethics committee approval was obtained. All the nurses were women, with ages from 23 to 49 years. Their working tenure ranged from 3 to 30 years, and their weekly working hours ranged from 40 to 48 h. The thematic analysis revealed 3 themes (aspects of nurses, patients, and families) and 7 sub-themes of facilitating factors (the effort that nurses put in, communication skills, solid theoretical foundation, etc.) as well as 4 themes (aspects of nurses, patients, families, and nation) and 11 sub-themes (workload, emotional resonance, the cooperation of family members, etc.) of hampering factors. Providing professional spiritual care to cancer patients is a goal that oncology nurses are trained to achieve, but problematic external factors should be recognized from the perspective of patients and families, while positive factors should be effectively used to promote the development of spiritual care. In nursing, spiritual care is as important as physical care, and thus, the ability to deliver spiritual care should be nurtured.