The African Journal of Primary Health & Family Medicine welcomes submissions that encourage scholarly exchange between family medicine and primary health care researchers and practitioners across Africa and the developing world, whilst providing a contextual and holistic view of family medicine as practiced across the continent.

Integration of spiritual aspects in teaching and learning is very important for educators and students. The study explored the barriers impeding the integration of spirituality and spiritual care in occupational therapy education in a South African context. An exploratory-descriptive study employing focus group discussions was conducted with purposive sample of 29 occupational therapy students and 9 educators. Thematic analysis was used in this study. Themes emerged from the present study which identified the barriers to spirituality and spiritual care included barriers to teaching spirituality in the classroom; barriers to spirituality in fieldwork practice and barriers to spirituality at personal level.

This modified Delphi study aimed to develop educational guidelines for integrating spirituality and spiritual care into occupational therapy education. The first round comprised a self-administered questionnaire, the second round used a face-to-face workshop, and last round reviewed the developed educational guidelines, which reached the highest agreement and median values greater than 3.25. A panel of 18 comprised occupational therapy educators, clinicians, and nursing experts were recruited. A total of 126 out of 142 items reached the highest agreements from the panel participants, categorized based on the content knowledge-based, importance, skills, ethics, pedagogical approaches, teaching and learning strategies, and assessment of student learning.

Spirituality and spiritual care are both considered as important elements of health sciences education; however, limited research has been conducted with occupational therapy students using spirituality scales. Therefore, this study assessed the internal consistency component of reliability and carried out factor analyses of three spirituality scales which examined the perceptions and attitudes of South African undergraduate occupational therapy students regarding spirituality and spiritual care. This study used a cross-sectional survey design using convenience sampling to recruit 100 participants. The internal consistency of the instruments evaluated showed satisfactory reliability: i.e. the Spiritual Care-Giving Scale (±=0.946), the Spirituality and Spiritual Care Rating Scale (±= 0.764) and the Spirituality in Occupational Therapy scale (α=0.868). The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin measure of Sampling Adequacy values was 0.862, 0.883, and 0.868 respectively, indicating the appropriateness of the factor analysis. Factor analysis from varimax rotated results was also performed to identify the patterns of spirituality and spiritual care within the instruments. The total variances of the instruments were acceptable at 59.1, 67.6 and 69.8% respectively. An implication of these findings is the possibility that exposing occupational therapy students to spirituality and spiritual care could be useful for them to gain insight into and be sensitive to the clients' spiritual needs. Further research should be undertaken in other institutions of higher learning that offer occupational therapy programmes. Keywords: Exploratory factor analysis, reliability, spirituality, spiritual care, occupational therapy