Abstract:
Spiritual needs of palliative cancer patients is important for nurse to assess and respond for those patients to meet their spiritual well-being. The purposes of this descriptive correlational research design aimed to analyze the relationship between perceived severity of illness, religious practice and social support with spiritual needs in palliative cancer patients. Eighty-four palliative cancer patients, who have a palliative performance scale 30-60%, admitted to of Maharat Nakhon Ratchasima Hospital were recruited into this study by the method of setting the time period. Data were collected during November and December, 2020 using The Demographic Questionnaire, The Spiritual Needs Questionnaire, The Religious Practice Questionnaire, The Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support and The Perceived Severity of Illness Questionnaire. They demonstrated acceptable reliability with Cronbachs alphas at .82, .85, .83, and .85, respectively. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and Pearsons product moment correlation coefficient. The research results showed that palliative cancer patients had high level of spiritual needs (M = 2.67, SD = 0.12). There was significantly positive relationship between perceived severity of illness, religious practices and social support with spiritual needs (r= .40, p< .001; r= .36, p< .01, r= .25, p< .05 respectively). This research result reveal that the palliative cancer patients had high level of spiritual needs. The findings suggest that nurses should develop nursing guideline for caring and response to spiritual needs of the palliative cancer patients by evaluation the level of severity of illness, supporting religious practices and social support to improve quality the patients spiritual well-being and quality of life in the terminal stages.