Heart disease is the major cause of death among Palestinians. Significantly higher levels of stress can lead to repeated hospitalizations; consequently, preventing and relieving stress becomes a major concern for this group of patients in many countries. One of the approaches to reduce stress is the provision of spiritual care, which helps to decrease levels of stress and increase patients‘ abilities to cope emotionally.
Although it is important, health care professionals tend to ignore spiritual care and focus on meeting the physical needs of their patient. Recently, more attention has been paid to spirituality in health care and the relationship between spirituality and illness is at the center of a growing body of literature. As a result, many hospitals in the Western countries have started to offer spiritual care to their clients. In Gaza Strip, there is no clear policy about providing spiritual care. The present study aimed to assess if spiritual care is provided to hospitalized cardiac patients who live in Gaza Strip, who should provide this care, explore the barriers to provision of such care, and how to overcome these barriers.
The design for the study used both qualitative and quantitative approaches in data collection. A total of 279 cardiac patients (response rate of 99.29%) and twelve healthcare providers participated in the study. A quantitative data collection approach was used to collect data from cardiac patients, while a qualitative approach using a semi-structured interview was used to collect data from healthcare providers.
Results revealed that there is a severe shortage of spiritual care provision to cardiac patients. The majority (n=159, 57%) preferred that nurses provide such spiritual care to them.
The responses of healthcare providers regarding the barriers and obstacles they face in providing spiritual care were grouped into several categories. These barriers included inadequate education and training, ambiguity about spirituality, inadequate time, shortage of staff, policy-related barriers, and individual-related barrier. Most of the barriers reported by the health care participants have been reported in the literature.
To overcome these barriers, health care professionals suggested several strategies that were categorized under the following themes: policy change, organizational interventions, including spirituality in health education and other miscellaneous interventions.
Because heart disease is the leading cause of death in Palestine and providing spiritual care to cardiac patients will help to decrease their stress and length of stay in the hospital, while also decreasing the cost of their treatment, health policy-makers need to pay more attention to this groups of patients and should adopt a spiritual care policy as an operative component of the health care system.