Spiritual wellbeing conditions of patients who got cancer diagnosis and identifying their spiritual care necessity

Cancer is a complicated illness which affects human life in multidimensional way. It is also important that patients must be supperted not only physical, psychological and social way but also spiritual way. Spirituality has not a standart definition but it can be identified as believing and holding on an external power by going beyond oneself, questioning the meaning of life, hoping, loving and forgiving. Spirituality has so many advantage such as preventing ,healing and dealing with illness and also furthering health. On the other hand, individual's spiritual necessity is more abstract and more complicated than the physical necessity so it is too difficult to measure. For this reason, the physical necessity is mostly reglected. Nurses who are representatives of holistic healthcare, should identify the cancer patient in spiritual way and plan the essential attempt. This searching aims to identify cancer patient's spiritual wellbeing conditions and their spiritual care necessity and also draw attention to spirituality when care is planned. The population are made up of 100 patients who are treated in hematology –oncology clinic in Kahramanmaraş Sütçü İmam University Health Practice And Research Hospital. Some of these 100 patients who take part in this sample are volunteer. At collecting data, it is used a questinnaire form which is developed by researcher about cancer patient's spiritual wellbeing conditions and their spiritual care necessity. This questionaire has ECOG performance scale. The data which is obtaired from searching is analized by using SPSS. Since the data is not suitable to the normal distribution, it is applied for Mann-Whitney U Test, are way analysis of varience, Kruskal Wallis H Test within non-parametric tests. According to searching verity, it is determined that 64.0 percent of patients who take part in this searching are male and their age average is between 60.51±13.56 and 42.0 percent of patients are at the age range of 71-88. It is detected that 86.0 percent of patient's cancer types is oncology and 68.0 percent of cancer phase is fourth phase. And also it is detected that 41.0 percent of patients receive symptomatic treatment, 94.0 percent of patient's diagnosis time is between 1-5 years, 51.0 percent of patients have another chronic illness, 61.0 percent of patient's hospitalize between 1-5 times in the recent year. When the cancer patient's ECOG performance scores are examined, it is detected that the highest scor is 2 with 35.0 percent. When it is examined how the patients evaluate the effects of the treatment which is practiced to them, it is detected that 49.0 percent of patients think that the treatment is medium-level effective, 86.0 percent of patients have family support in high level, 66.0 percent of patients have always the same spiritual necessity with the diagnosis, 39.0 percent of patients pray being a spiritual necessity, 85.0 percent of patients don't share any spiritual necessity with healthcare personnels. With the results of ROC Analyze which is done for identifying spiritual wellbeing questionaire and its break point of sub-dimension level, point average which is correspond to the points of the highest susceptibility and the lowest specificity, is identified being 2.47 break point. According to this point, the spiritual wellbeing level of patients who take part in this searching is found in the highest degree with 2.53. When the relationship between the spiritual wellbeing level of participants of this searching and its sub-dimension according to family support is examined, it is detected that the mean rank of spiritual wellbeing level (degree) and its sub-dimension differs from in the level of significance in terms of statistic (p<0.05). When the spiritual wellbeing level of the participants of this searching and its spiritual value of sub-dimension are searched whether they differ from according to their share with healthcare personnels or not, the spiritual value of the mean rank of spiritual wellbeing level and its sub-dimension according to the share with healthcare personnels differs from in the level of significance in terms of statics (p<0.05). According to these results; it is detected that our patients have the highest wellbeing status but they are not able to talk enough with the healthcare professionals. Key Words: cancer, spirituality, nursing care