Browse by author
Lookup NU author(s): Dr Orla Whitehead, Dr Mark AdleyORCiD, Dr Alex ThompsonORCiD, Philip Mordue, Professor Amy O'DonnellORCiD, Professor Barbara HanrattyORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
© The Author(s) 2025.Background: Social prescribing aims to provide holistic care to patients and meet needs that expand beyond the biomedical model. Holistic care includes spiritual health. However, the understanding of social prescribers’ attitudes towards discussing spiritual health with their patients is limited. This study aimed to understand how spiritual health currently fits into social prescribing and explore barriers and facilitators to incorporating spiritual health within social prescribing practice. Method: Twelve social prescribers were interviewed online, using semi-structured interviews. These interviews were an hour long and covered aspects of spiritual health within social prescribing, as well as barriers and facilitators to the discussion of spiritual health within social prescribing. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the interviews by three researchers. Results: Currently, social prescribers use community faith-based organisations mainly for non-spiritual holistic support, especially around practical items. They identified an overlap and limited differentiation between spiritual health and mental health. When a patient discloses spiritual health needs, social prescribers felt they were open to helping patients access help. Barriers and facilitators to the discussion of spiritual health included: viewing religion as a sensitive topic and a subsequent fear of ‘deep conversations’; concern about harm or offence to vulnerable patients; social prescribers’ comfort and confidence with the topic being part of their role, as well as discordance/concordance with patient beliefs. Conclusions: Social prescribers appeared very open to the topic of spiritual health; however many felt more confident with non-traditional-Western spiritual activities such as yoga or meditation, and using community faith-based organisations for non-spiritual support. Bespoke training for those in primary care could address barriers to the inclusion of spiritual health in primary care, but a systemic cultural approach is needed.
Author(s): Whitehead IO, Adley M, Thompson A, Mordue P, O'Donnell A, Hanratty B
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: BMC Primary Care
Year: 2026
Volume: 27
Issue: 10
Print publication date: 13/01/2026
Online publication date: 10/12/2025
Acceptance date: 01/10/2025
Date deposited: 26/01/2026
ISSN (electronic): 2731-4553
Publisher: BioMed Central Ltd
URL: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12875-025-03060-0
DOI: 10.1186/s12875-025-03060-0
Data Access Statement: Data are saved on Newcastle University secure servers and may be available in negotiation with the first author. While participants were not consented to allow public sharing of this data, data are available upon reasonable request to the authors.
PubMed id: 41372806
Altmetrics provided by Altmetric
