Learning Objective #1: realize the stress and the spiritual health of nursing students when students start clinical training.

Learning Objective #2: have an evidence to modify the clinical training program and to help students to learn nursing more easily.

---

Nursing students always have much stress in clinical training program even though they learn the principles of nursing from classroom very well. Despite spiritual health becomes more important in recent years, the spiritual health of nursing students is often ignored. The aim of this study is to explore the stress and the spiritual health of nursing students when they start clinical training. A questionnaire was used to obtain data about the demographic information, the status of stress and spiritual health of the student in clinical practice. A total of 507 valid questionnaires were collected from a nursing college in Taiwan. Descriptive statistics, one-way ANOVA, Chi-Square test and Pearson correlation were used for statistical analysis. The results showed that the highest stress scores were homework and clinical work, followed by lack of professional knowledge and skills. The highest score of spiritual health was aspect of “connecting to others”, followed by “meaning derived from living”. Spiritual health showed a statistically significant negative correlation with stress (r=-0.314;p<0.0001). The statistically significant factors for stress were major distressed events during life, experience about caring sick relatives previously, difficulty in clinical training, liking clinical practice, attitude to nursing, being a clinical nurse after graduation. The statistically significant factors for spiritual health were ranking in family, devotion to religion, father's education, relationship between students and family, poor relationship with other students, poor school performance, poor clinical performance, liking clinical practice, attitude to nursing and being a clinical nurse after graduation.