Addressing the spiritual needs of patients with serious illness in Lebanon: perspectives and practices of palliative care professionals
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Spiritual care is an essential component of palliative care, supporting the existential and spiritual wellbeing of patients with serious illnesses. Yet, its effective implementation remains challenging in many healthcare systems. This study examines the experiences and practices of palliative care clinicians in Lebanon, a country characterized by religious diversity, high religiosity, and a complex political landscape. METHODS: A qualitative focus group study rooted in constructionist ontology. Palliative care clinicians were recruited from community and acute settings in Lebanon. Data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. RESULTS: Three overarching themes: (1) the political context and religious tensions create sensitivities around spiritual care provision, (2) existing spiritual assessment tools are incompatible with local needs, and (3) the desire to safeguard therapeutic connection drives adaptations in spiritual care provision. Participants highlighted how religious and political tensions in Lebanon complicate spiritual care delivery, with concerns about judgment, religious discordance, and cultural misalignment. Western-developed approaches were deemed culturally incongruent, prompting providers to adapt or abandon standardized approaches in favor of personalized, context-sensitive methods. Adaptations included fostering environments for spontaneous spiritual discussions and tailoring assessments to individual patient needs. CONCLUSIONS: This study contributes to the growing discourse on the importance of contextualizing palliative care to meet the unique needs of diverse populations, particularly in settings marked by religious and political complexity. Future research should focus on developing context-specific approaches. Training programs should support providers in delivering effective, culturally sensitive spiritual care.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".