The Effects of Religious and Spiritual Interventions on the Resilience of Family Members of Patients in the ICU

Background: Spiritual support, belief in God, and praying are of the elements and tools used by a family to deal with stressful events. Objectives: The present study is aimed at examining the effects of spiritual and religious interventions on the resilience of family members of ICU patients. Methods: A quasi-experimental study was carried out with participation of 34 family members and blood relatives who kept the patients in the ICU ward of Kermanshah Imam Reza hospital company. The participants were selected through convenient sampling and then randomly allocated to the experiment (n = 17) and control (n = 17) groups. The experiment group received interventions in the form of spiritual-religious intervention sessions (8 group sessions, 3 sessions a week, each 45 - 60 minutes). Resilience was measured using Connor Davidson resilience scale (CD RIS) before and after the interventions and the data was analyzed in SPSS (20). Results: Paired t-test results indicated that there was a significant difference in terms of the mean score of resilience before and after the religious and spiritual interventions in the experiment group (P value = 0.001). The test also showed that there was no significant difference in terms of the mean resilience score before and after the interventions in the control group (P value = 0.525). The results of independent t-test indicated that there was no statistically significant difference (P value = 0.663) between the control and experimental groups before the interventions, whereas there was a statistically significant difference between the control and experimental groups after the intervention (P value = 0.025). Conclusions: The findings showed significant effectiveness of spiritual- religious interventions on increasing the resilience of family members of patients.