Those involved with hospice and palliative care, including nurses, will inevitably experience or be exposed to suffering. Self-compassion represents a personal resource and support for self-care, ensuring that needs are not neglected particularly during times of suffering. However, the empirical evidence for self-compassion in hospice and palliative care is yet to be reviewed systematically. To synthesize the evidence on self-compassion in hospice and palliative care patients, their relatives, and health care professionals, we conducted a systematic integrative review using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses statement. For patients, self-compassion was associated with reduced stress, anxiety, shame, depressive symptoms, fear of cancer recurrence, and loneliness. It was also associated with increased social capital, self-soothing, mindfulness, compassion, causal reasoning ability, psychosocial and spiritual well-being, legacy, courage, and commitment. For health care professionals, self-compassion was associated with increased capacity for self-care, mindfulness, and professional quality of life and a decrease in perceived burnout risk and secondary traumatic stress. No studies were found to involve patients' relatives. Self-compassion seems to be an important resource in hospice and palliative care. It supports self-care and alleviates suffering by improving the social, psychosocial, and spiritual well-being of patients and health care professionals, including hospice and palliative care nurses. Future research should include care patients' relatives.

The objective of the present study is to investigate the use of religious/spiritual coping mechanisms in patients with chronic kidney disease undergoing hemodialysis, by means of interviews using a sociodemographic questionnaire and the religious/spiritual coping scale. Data analysis was performed using descriptive statistics and multiple linear regression. A total of 123 individuals were interviewed, 79.6% of whom presented a high score for religious/spiritual coping and none of whom presented low or irrelevant scores. The variables that affected the religious/spiritual coping behavior were: gender, age group, treatment time, family income, and religious practice. In conclusion, the participants used religious/spiritual coping mechanisms as a strategy to cope with the disease, particularly women with a higher family income who attend church every week.

Purpose: To analyze the relation between anxiety and spiritual well-being in undergraduate nursing students. Design: Cross sectional, correlational, and survey design. Method: A total of 169 students from a Brazilian Nursing School completed three instruments: demographic data, Spiritual Well-Being Scale (SWBS), and Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI). Findings: The mean score of SWBS was high, and the mean score of BAI was low. When experiencing anxiety, there was lower probability of experiencing high spiritual well-being. For those students considering religiosity very important, the score of SWBS was high. Students scoring lower in SWBS had more probability of experiencing moderate/high anxiety. Conclusions: Higher scores of SWBS and importance given to religiosity were related to lower scores of BAI. Also, the performance and score of spiritual well-being were related to anxiety scores. Further research is worthy to identify and validate which educational aspects could promote spiritual well-being and reduce anxiety as well as research to analyze the relation between spiritual well-being score and learning outcomes.