Spiritual Well-being of chronically III Hospitalized patients: a comparative study in Lithuania, Portugal and Brazil

Abstract

Aims: The concept of spiritual well-being is ambiguous. It may be described as the ability to experience and integrate meaning and purpose in life through connectedness with self, others, nature, or a power greater than oneself. Patients' perceptions and understanding of spiritual wellbeing may be diverse and subjective. To insure individual, person-oriented care, professionals have to be informed how patients' spiritual well-being and spiritual needs influence their health care needs and expectations. In Lithuania, Portugal and Brazil spiritual health/well-being, as a dimension of holistic patient care, is under-investigated, presumably due to ambiquity of the concepts, complexity of phenomena and lack of appropriate instruments for valid, relevant measurements. This study aims to assess spiritual wellbeing in these three different cultural contexts. Design, participants and methods: Spiritual well-being was quantitatively studied in connection with patients' level of satisfaction with life , using the Spiritual Well-Being Questionnaire/SHALOM and Satisfaction with Life Scale that were translated and adapted linguistically, culturally and in nursing practice. SHALOM provides a unique way of assessing spiritual wellbeing as it compares each person's ideals with their lived experiences, providing measures of spiritual harmony or dissonance in four domains: personal, communal, environmental and transcendental. The study was carried out in long-term care facilities and nursing homes using face-to-face individual structured interviews with chronically ill hospitalized patients. [...].