Development and Validity and Reliability of an Instrument to Assess Patient’s Spiritual Well-Being

Abstract

Background

Spiritual care is not limited to palliative care or end-of-life care. The spiritual well-being of patients also needs to be taken into account in the multidisciplinary healthcare system of whole person care. For medical institutions providing spiritual care, it is necessary to develop a tool for clinical spiritual care providers to assess patient’s spiritual well-being of.

Aim

The purpose of this study was to construct a questionnaire that would allow spiritual care providers or pastors to assess the spiritual well-being of patients.

Methods

The study combined qualitative and quantitative research methods. Qualitative research used in-depth interviews or focus groups with patients and family members to obtain textual data. The text was analyzed by Colaizzi analysis. The researchers constructed the Patient’s Spiritual Well-Being Scale (PtSpWBS) from the themes obtained through qualitative analysis. Through the participation of 661 patients, quantitative research was conducted to analyze the reliability, validity and component analysis of the PtSpWBS.

Results

Through qualitative research, it was found the spiritual needs of patients had two domains, namely spiritual awareness and spiritual dynamics. Based on this result, a 15-question PtSpWBS was designed. Cronbach’s alpha was used to check the reliability of the PtSpWBS, and the internal consistency was calculated with a Cronbach’s alpha value of 0.899. The Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity of the PtSpWBS reached a significant difference (p<0.0001), and the KMO value of sampling appropriateness was 0.900. The three components were spiritual health, religion connection, and spiritual awareness. A PtSpWBS score ≦ 41 indicated the patient had poor spiritual well-being.

Conclusion

The study constructed the PtSpWBS for clinical spiritual care providers to evaluate spiritual well-being of patients; this questionnaire has good reliability and validity. The PtSpWBS can be truly used by departments that specialize in providing spiritual care in medical institutions to conduct spiritual well-being assessment.

Keywords:

• spiritual well-being
• spiritual care
• patient
• clinical spiritual care provider
• pastor

Consent

Informed Consent was obtained from all participants in the study.

Acknowledgments

Funding for this study came from MacKay Memorial Hospital, and the entire process was supervised by the hospital’s Ethics Committee. We would like to thank the pastors and clinical spiritual care providers of the Department of Pastoral Care who received strict research ethics training for the quality and smooth conduct of this study. We appreciate all patients and families participating in this study. We would like to thank all those involved in this study, especially those who worked together to overcome various difficulties to complete this study during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Disclosure

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. The authors have no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose.