The Effect of an Empowerment Program on the Spiritual Care Competence of Nursing Students: A Randomized Clinical Trial Study

"Spiritual care is an integrated section of nursing. Proper implementation of it to patients requires that care providers have the necessary competencies in this regard. Therefore, this study was performed to investigate the effect of an empowering program on spiritual care competence (SCC) in nursing students. This study was a randomized controlled trial that was performed on 60 nursing students at Kashan University of Medical Sciences, Iran. Participants were randomly assigned to two groups. The intervention group was under the spiritual empowering plan in seven sessions. The control group was traditionally trained. Data were collected by a spiritual care competence scale and analyzed using Fisher, independent and paired t-test in SPSS 16v. Baseline characteristics were similar in the two groups. The mean score of SCC was significantly increased post-empowerment for the intervention group. The differences between the two groups were statistically significant in the SCC scores (p<0.037). A significant difference was observed between the mean of the SCC score of the intervention group before and after the empowering (p < 0.0001). While, no significant changes were observed in the control group, before and after the study (p= 0.44). Empowering spiritual care skills in nursing students develops the quality of care in patients, which requires more attention in the educational curriculum."