Spiritual Well-being and Psychosocial Adjustment among Taiwanese Patients with Colostomy

Purpose:

Colorectal cancer is the third-deadliest cancer in Taiwan. Ostomy surgery can help save lives and improve the quality of patients’ remaining life, but it also has a profound effect on their psychosocial adjustment. Studies indicate that spiritual well-being might reduce distress and positively affect patients’ overall adjustment. The purpose of this research is to explore the degree of this correlation and detect the relationships between spiritual well-being and psychosocial adjustment for patients with colorectal cancer and colostomy in Taiwan.

Methods:

This research was a cross-sectional study using three structured questionnaires, including the scale of demographics and medicine, the Spiritual Well-Being Scale, and the Psychosocial Adjustment to Illness Scale—self report. Forty-one participants with colorectal cancer and colostomy were recruited from the Department of Surgical Gastroenterology outpatient unit in a medical center in National Taiwan University. Data were analyzed by SPSS 12.0 using descriptive statistics and the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient.

Results:

Participants have “medium” spiritual well-being, showing a medium-strength relationship with God, medium life satisfaction, and medium degree of life-goal achievement. However, 43.8% of the subjects have an abnormal psychosocial adjustment. Of these, the adjustment to extended family relationships is best and that to sexual relationships is worst. Furthermore, the spiritual well-being and overall psychosocial adjustment have a significant negative correlation (r = –0.60, p < 0.001), meaning that a better spiritual well-being leads to a better overall psychosocial adjustment.

Conclusions:

Taiwanese people are generally conservative and are hesitant or unable to ask medical staff questions about sex. Nurses should evaluate patients’ after-surgery sexual lives automatically to provide professional sexual care. Furthermore, a proper evaluation can help nurses understand the patients’ spiritual well-being and provide patients with professional spiritual care, in hopes of improving their spiritual well-being and helping them have better psychosocial adjustment after surgery.