Spiritual care and spirituality in academic nursing training: scoping review

Abstract

Objective: To map existing studies in scientific literature addressing spiritual care and spirituality in academic nursing training.   Materials and method: This is a scoping review, whose article search was conducted in July 2023 in the databases Scopus, Medline/PubMed, ScienceDirect, Google® Scholar, and through a manual search of entries in the list of references of selected papers. The following research question was formulated for this study: How are spiritual care and spirituality addressed in academic nursingtraining? After applying the inclusion and exclusion criteria, the final sample consisted of 45 papers. Results: The main findings highlight a deficit in academic training, the importance of teachers as facilitators of the teaching-learning process, the essential methodologies to address the issue of spirituality, and the specific competences required in spiritual care, such ascommunication, empathy, attitude towards the patient’s spirituality, personal support, counseling, and the proper application of the nursing process in this type of care. Conclusions: This review made it possible to identify how spiritual care and spirituality are addressed in the academic training of nurses, where the insertion of educational resources for spiritual care and approaches based on competences were emphasized. Despite this, spiritual-related teaching is still deficient in academic formation.Studies recommend modifying the curriculum to  strengthen competencies related to spirituality and spiritual care in the nursing academy.