Background: Life quality and its promotional strategies among patients with acute and debilitating diseases, especially cancer, have been considered from a long time ago by medical and nursing societies. One of the methods to promote the patient's life quality is spiritual care which can be in form of prayer. The results of the studies done about the choice of the best praying method for the patients involves a lot of challenges. Thus, the researchers decided to examine the effect of two individual and choral praying methods on the life quality of the cancer-stricken patients.
Methods: The present study was conducted in two-staged clinical trial using pre-post test administration in which the researcher examined the effect of two individual and choral praying methods on the life quality of 70 cancer-stricken patients. Data collection to assess the life quality was performed by World Health Organization Brief Life Quality Questionnaire.
Results: The current research showed that the life quality score was increased in the individual-choral group after the intervention. Also, comparing the average life quality score in the two groups of individual and choral praying revealed a significant difference in which the quality of life had improved more in the choral praying group than in the individual praying group.
Conclusions: The findings of the present study indicated the positive effect of praying and supplication on the life quality of cancer-stricken patients. Generally, choral praying has a better effect on the life quality of cancer-stricken patients compared with praying individually. More studies with a larger sample size are suggested in order to verify the effect of praying on the life quality of cancer-stricken patients.
Keywords: Cancer; choral praying; individual praying; life quality; nursing.