Although spiritual care is commonly regarded as a nursing task, in practice, it is often provided inadequately.

The purpose of this study was to examine relationship between attitude toward spirituality and the attitude and performance of spiritual care among nurses who working in hospitals of Iran university of medical sciences.

This was a correlative-descriptive study. Spiritual Perspective Scale (SPS) and Nursing Spiritual Care Perspective Scale (NSCPS) were used to gather the data. A number of 166 nurses participated in this study.

Findings showed that of nurses’ spirituality attitude score was 4.98 ± 1.1 which indicated high attitude toward spirituality. The total average of nurses’ attitude about spiritual practices was 3.67 ± 0.51, which signified the positive attitude of nurses about spiritual practices. Findings revealed that positive spiritual attitude had a significant correlation with 6 out of 12 expressed spiritual interventions. In addition, spiritual attitude generally had a significant positive correlation with spiritual interventions. The positive spiritual attitude had a significant correlation with only 3 items out of 11 for the attitude toward spiritual practices. There was no correlation between spiritual attitude and the attitude toward spiritual practices.

In spite of the positive attitude, nurses did not perform half of the spiritual interventions which most of them were in line with fulfilling the patients’ religious needs. Establishment of in-service education program regarding spiritual care practice by role play and modeling methods are recommended.

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.