Abstract
Spiritual care means helping an individual protect, maintain and gain all the dimensions of his/her existence. Elderly care technicians face numerous cases or crisis situations in which elderly individuals from different backgrounds question the meaning and value of life. Elderly care technicians must acknowledge that the spirituality is an important element in the way an elderly individual receives healthcare and they must be equipped for this matter. This study was conducted in order to examine the influence of “Skill Development Training Program for Spiritual Care of Elderly Individual,” which was carried out with students from elderly care program, on the perception of spirituality support in a pretest–posttest quasi-experimental study design with control group. As the data collection form, “Spiritual Support Perception” (SSP) scale was used. The mean scores of the intervention group after the training and after one month are 50.39 ± 5.34 and 51.13 ± 4.98, respectively, and those of the control group are 43.16 ± 4.83 and 42.72 ± 4.48. A statistically significant difference was found between the mean scores of the intervention group from the pretest and the posttests immediately after the training and one month after the training (f = 94.247, p = 0.001). In the control group, however, there was no significant change in the SSP mean scores (f = 0.269, p = 0.77). As a result, this study pointed out the necessity of such training programs for healthcare professionals to make a distinction between their professional duties and their own personalities in order to offer spiritual care to the elderly individual.
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All authors have completed the Unified Competing Interest form and declare no support from any organization for the submitted work. Author SB, author EU and author YD declare that they have no conflict of interest. This manuscript was presented as an oral presentation at the 4th International Vocational Schools Symposium, Turkey Yalova, May 21–23, 2015.
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This article does not contain any studies with animals performed by any of the authors. All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.
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Bulduk, S., Usta, E. & Dinçer, Y. The Influence of Skill Development Training Program for Spiritual Care of Elderly Individual on Elderly Care Technician Students’ Perception of Spiritual Support. J Relig Health 56, 852–860 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-016-0248-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-016-0248-1