Exploring the Definition of Spirituality from BSN Students in Taiwan

Because a nurse’s structured spiritual care may be different from that of a nursing student, the motivation of this study was to explore the definition of spirituality from the BSN students. This narrative study was supported by National Research Grant (MOST 103-2511-S-242 -001) with IRB approving by number FYH-IRB- 103-08-02 and conducted a teaching model of a spiritual nursing course for BSN program from August, 2014 to July, 2015. For BSN program, 36 nursing students would like to sign the consent form with 64.2% participating in the study out of 56 samples. The categories for the definition of spirituality included themselves, others, faith, soul, integration as well as the skills of listening, empathy, and accompanying for understanding the empty spaces of others and trying best to fulfill those spaces. The final definition of spirituality from the BSN students was the relationship among themselves, others, faith, soul. This study only explored the definition of spirituality, but lack of studies on the spiritual care from the nursing student's point of view. Since the literature has indicated the difficult teaching of spiritual care on nursing students due to many different factors, the author suggested to develop the nursing curriculum of training nursing students to self-aware and develop own and the patients's spiritual care by using various teaching strategies and activities.