Spiritual well-being and death anxiety levels of the patients hospitalized at the coronary intensive care unit

This research was conducted as a descriptive, cross-sectional, and correlational study to identify the spiritual well-being and death anxiety levels of patients hospitalized at a coronary intensive care unit. The study was performed with 222 patients who stayed at the coronary intensive care unit of a city hospital and consented to participate in the research. The research data were collected by using the Descriptive Characteristics Form, the Spiritual Well-Being 12-Item Scale, and the Scale of Death Anxiety. In the evaluation of research data, Levene's test, the Shapiro-Wilk test, the student's t-test, the Mann-Whitney U test, the one-way analysis of variance, and multiple comparison tests, namely, Tukey's range test, the Kruskal-Wallis H test, the Dunn-Bonferroni test, the spearman correlation analysis and pearson correlation analysis were used. It was discerned that the mean age of the participant patients was 59.15±12.70 years, 32.9% of them were female, 83.3% were married, and 34.2% were employed. As per some of participant patients' descriptive characteristics such as gender, education level, profession, income level, marital status, employment status, the state of having a chronic disease, and the health-evaluation outcome, it was found that there were statistically significant differences in the mean scores obtained by the participant patients from the Meaning Sub- Scale of the Spiritual Well-Being 12 Item Scale (p<0.05). Besides, as per participant patients' gender, marital status, profession, family type, and the current health state, it was identified that there were statistically significant differences in the mean scores obtained by the participant patients from the Scale of Death Anxiety (p<0.05). Moreover, it was discerned that there was a statistically significant strong positive relationship between the mean scores obtained by the participant patients from the Meaning Sub-Scale of the Spiritual Well-Being 12 Item Scale and the Scale of Death Anxiety (r=0.797) whilst there was a statistically significant weak negative relationship between mean scores obtained by the participant patients from the Peace Sub-Scale of the Spiritual Well-Being 12 Item Scale and the Scale of Death Anxiety (r=-0,159). Alongside this study, it is recommended that spiritual care practices be more intensively included in nursing care to alleviate the patients' anxiety levels and enhance their spiritual well-being levels.