A Review of Religious Orientation in Nurses and Nursing Students

Background and Purpose: Religious orientation exerts positive effects on general health and enhanced quality of nurses' care, bringing a huge improvement in the capability and efficiency of hospitals. The present study aimed to assess the religious orientation of nurses and nursing students.. Materials and Methods: In this study, a query was conducted on Pubmed, Scopus, Magiran, SID, Elmnet, Noor mags, and IranMedex databases for Persian and English articles from 2010-2020 using the keywords of religious orientation, religion, nurse, nursing student, and hospital in Persian and English. Results: The retrieved articles were descriptive correlation (n=7), descriptive cross-sectional (n=3), descriptive-analytical (n=3), exploratory analytical type (n=1), and structural equation modeling (n=1). Based on the obtained results, internal religious orientation was positively associated with spiritual health, general health, attitudes toward the elderly, nurses' job adjustment, hope, quality of nursing care, cultural sensitivity, moral sensitivity, age, work experience, psychological well-being, and acceptance of death. On the other hand, it was negatively correlated with death obsession, the components of mental health, depression, and death avoidance. Conclusion: The results of this study highlighted the necessity of devoting attention to religious orientation concerning the performance of nurses and nursing students. Therefore, it is suggested that nursing principals and departments of college hold special training courses for nurses and nursing students to use religious orientation for the improvement of the quality of patient care.