The Effects of Prayer as a Coping Strategy for Nurses

Purpose: To determine the effects of prayer as a coping strategy for nurses. Design: Quantitative descriptive design. Methods: The population was the 15,000 members of the American Society of Perianesthesia Nurses. Twelve hundred fifty nine subjects completed a demographic questionnaire and the Prayer Functions Scale. The surveys were available on SurveyMonkey.com for 2 weeks in the fall of 2014. Findings: Results indicated at alpha = 0.05 that the nurses surveyed experienced the effects of prayer, providing assistance, providing acceptance, providing calm, and deferring as benefits of use of prayer as a coping strategy. Conclusions: Reduction of nurses' stress through prayer is one way to ameliorate the ill effects that can impact nurses through stress. Nursing administration, nursing organizations, and academics could consider use of prayer as an effective coping mechanism in teaching, studying, and exploration of methods to help nurses cope with the inherent stressors of their profession.