Abstract

Spiritual Nursing Care (SNC) has been found to play a mitigating role in Chronic Kidney Disease conditions. However, the required knowledge to offer this care is questioned by many scholars. They believe that nurses’ level of knowledge of SNC is low and their practices of SNC are poor. Meanwhile, another set of scholars specifically studied nephrology nurses, they opined that nephrology nurses are in an advantaged position to help their patients better spiritually as a result of their closeness which is facilitated by constant hospital visits for care; they concluded that nephrology nurses have basic knowledge of SNC. However, anecdotal observation in clinical practice has it that when CKD patients have spent all they have seeking medical help for their ailments, that is when they resolve to seek spiritual solace; this should have been offered long during the course of their clinical care and apart from words of encouragement from nurses, nothing else is pointing to spiritual nursing care. This may be attributed to nurses' poor knowledge of spiritual nursing care. Hence, the study evaluated the level of knowledge on spiritual nursing care of nephrology nurses in two renal centres in Nigeria. The study adopted a quasi-experimental research design and sampled 13 certified nephrology nurses in group 1 and 15 in group 2. The questionnaire was the tool for data gathering. The questionnaire was self-developed from reviewed literature to cover the content area of the study. The questionnaire was in sections A - D. Pretest was carried out to check for internal consistency; the collected data were statistically analyzed using SPSS version 25 to get the reliability coefficient. The Cronbach’s alpha for this instrument was 0.879 (sections B, C and D are 0.670, 0.753 and 0.935 respectively). Data generated from the study were processed using the statistical package for social sciences (SPSS) version 25. Descriptive statistics such as frequency counts, percentages, mean and standard deviation were used to answer two (2) research questions, while inferential statistics, independent T-tests, and Manova were used to answer the two (2) hypotheses. Results presented using tables show the social demographics of the nephrology nurses, that they have knowledge of SNC and socio-demographic characteristics; gender and level of education have no influence on the level of knowledge on spiritual nursing care. The study, therefore, recommended that standardization on concepts of spirituality and spiritual nursing care should be established and publicized. This will help ascertain specifics in the knowledge of SNC.