Iran Journal of Nursing

Introduction
Nurses were the largest group of healthcare providers during the COVID-19 pandemic. The conducted studies have indicated that the provision of quality services by nurses is influenced by factors such as cultural, spiritual, and personal factors. The nurses with a higher competence, by taking into account these factors, can play an important role in providing quality nursing care. The spiritual factor plays an important role in improving patients’ health and satisfaction with the treatments. Nurses who pay attention to the spiritual needs of patients have higher competence in spiritual care and can meet the patient’s spiritual needs through good communication with them and gain their satisfaction and thus provide better quality nursing care to them. Patients with COVID-19 are in dire need of spiritual care due to being alone in quarantine, away from their families. The present study aims to determine the spiritual care competence of nurses working in special care units for COVID-19 in Arak, Iran.

Methods 
This descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted in 2022. The study population consists of all nurses working in the special care units of hospitals for COVID-19 patients in Arak. The inclusion criteria were at least a bachelor’s degree in nursing and working in the special care units for Covid-19 patients in the study hospitals. All nurses (n=150) were selected for the study. We used two demographic form and spiritual care competence scale (SCCS), which were completed by a self-report method. In this study, the internal consistency of the Persian SCCS was checked by calculating Cronbach’s α coefficient was obtained 0.95. Data analysis was done in SPSS software, version 16 using descriptive statistics (frequency, percentage, Mean±SD) and inferential statistics (independent t-test, analysis of variance, and Pearson correlation test). P<0.05 was considered statistically significant.

Results
In this study, the response rate was 94.6% (142 answered the questions). The participants had a mean age of 32.65±6.12 years. Most of them were female (84.5%), with a bachelor’s degree (90.8%), married (59.9%), and were interested in the nursing profession (74.6%). The findings showed that, among the dimensions of SCCS, communication (70.86±19.33) had the highest score, while assessing and implementing spiritual care (64.02±15.26) had the lowest score. The mean total score of SCCS was 100.71±14.45, which was higher than the median score of 81. Marital status had a significant relationship with spiritual care competence (P=0.04), such that the spiritual care competence of married nurses was higher than that of single nurses. Another variable that had a significant relationship with spiritual care competence was the willingness to work overtime (P<0.001), such that the nurses who were willing to work overtime had higher spiritual care competence. According to the Pearson correlation test results, the spiritual care competence had a significant positive correlation with age (P=0.011), total work experience (P=0.03) and work experience in the special care unit (P=0.025), indicating that the increase of age, work experience, and experience in the special care unit can increase the spiritual care competence of nurses.

Conclusion
The spiritual care competence of nurses in the study hospitals is at a favorable level. The results of this study can be a help future studies in improving the quality of nursing care and the competence of nurses in spiritual care.

Ethical Considerations
Compliance with ethical guidelines
This study was approved by the Ethics Committee of Iran University of Medical Sciences (Code: IR.IUMS.REC.1400.974). The study objectives and methods were explained to the participants and a written informed consent was obtained from them.

Funding
This article was extracted from the master’s thesis of Fateme Ebrahimi, approved by Department of Internal Surgery Nursing, School of Nursing and Midwifery, Iran University of Medical Sciences. 

Authors' contributions
Conceptualization, project administration, and supervision: Ezzat Jafarjalal;  Data collection: Fateme Ebrahimi; Data analysis: Shima Haghani; Writing: Fateme Ebrahimi and Tahareh Najafi Ghezelche.

Conflict of interest
The authors declared no conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank all the nurses participated in this research.

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