How can we in the medical field help create an environment where patients and family members feel open to communicating cultural and spiritual needs regarding end-of-life care?

Culture and spirituality are fundamental part of end-of-life care that is frequently overlooked by healthcare providers. Culture, spirituality, and religion are social health determinant factors that impact an individual’s understanding of health, illness, and death, and thus resultantly affect decision-making regarding end-of-life care (Johnson et al., 2020). Patients’ cultural and spiritual needs effectively address issues surrounding imminent death such as the urge to find meaning and coherence, the desire for connection to a greater reality, and to transcend (Soto-Rubio et al., 2020). There is, therefore, a need for healthcare professionals to accommodate patients’ cultures and religions to ensure holistic and high-quality end-of-life care.

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Various benefits that result from addressing the patient’s cultural and spiritual needs. These include improved general affective well-being, reduced desire for hastened demise, better emotional well-being, improved resilience, effective symptomatic relief, fewer depressive symptoms, and fewer concerns and worries about death (Soto-Rubio et al., 2020). This results in acceptance of the terminal illness and death. End-of-life care models that are culturally and spiritually appropriate should thus be integrated into palliative patient care.

Healthcare teams have the responsibility of creating an environment where patients and their loved ones communicate about their cultural and religious needs openly. They can develop spiritual and cultural competency by enhancing their knowledge and skills in the provision of culturally and spiritually sensitive care as well as raise awareness and educate patients on how to access spiritually and culturally safe care and inclusive care (Nalayeh et al., 2018). This can be easily initiated through the facilitation of discussions on spirituality and culture in a friendly manner in the context of end-of-life care. Some of the effective measures that can be employed are mostly psychological interventions. Cultural and spiritual well-being counseling, meaning-centered psychotherapy, and cognitive existential group psychotherapy are examples of such interventions (Soto-Rubio et al., 2020). This will not only improve the patient’s quality of life but also enhance acceptance of the patient situation.