PERCEPTIONS OF SPIRITUAL HEALTH HELD BY THE AFRICAN SEVENTH-DAY-ADVENTIST NURSING STUDENTS

Authors

Spirituality, Health, Medicine, African Traditional, Spiritual health

In Africa health is often associated with spirituality. In this study the concept of spiritual health

is discussed and the main interest is to find whether the general concept of health includes spiritual

health as a sub-area. At the same time the research aims to test the semi-structured questionnaire

as a research tool for the spiritual health research in Africa.

This study was conducted with a short semi-structured questionnaire. The questionnaire

includes totally 20 questions. Two of these are open-ended qualitative questions, while the remaining

18 are semi-structured or structured.

Totally 93 (N1=93) Kenyan nursing students were asked to participate in this study, and 91

(N2=91) of them returned a completed survey form, keeping the response rate at 97.8 %. The students

were enrolled in two different nursing schools: 43.9 % of them studied at the Kendu Adventist School

of Nursing while the rest 58.2 % studied nursing at the University of the East Africa, Baraton.

Large amount of respondents (65.9 % ) believed very strongly that there exists another

dimension to health apart from the physical, psychological and social, called spiritual dimension.

Physical dimension was ranked to be the most important by 33 students, while psychological

dimension was the most important for only 13 students. According to 34.1 % of the respondents

a spiritually healthy person falls ill less frequently, while almost 60 % (n=53) did not agree with

the claim. Still most of the students (82.4 %) thought that a spiritually healthy person copes better

with illness, recovers faster (67.0 %) and deals better with stress (94.5 %). More than 75 % of

students think that a spiritually healthy person faces or deals better with death. Most of the students

(94.5 %) think that patients have spiritual needs and the same amount of students think that health

professionals should have some formal training in dealing with spiritual health in medical practice.