Palliative care patients’ relatives’ perspectives on religion, spirituality, and death: a qualitative study

Spirituality and religion play an important role in helping individuals cope with life-threatening illnesses and end-of-life experiences. However, qualitative evidence exploring how relatives of palliative care patients perceive religion, spirituality, and death remains limited. This study aimed to explore the perspectives of relatives of palliative care patients regarding religion, spirituality, and death. A qualitative descriptive design was employed. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with five relatives of patients receiving care in the palliative care unit of a university hospital in Türkiye. Data were analyzed using Braun and Clarke's inductive thematic analysis. The analysis generated five overarching themes and ten subthemes, capturing participants' experiences of the emotional journey of caregiving, religion and spirituality as multidimensional coping resources, transformation in perceptions of death and life, spiritual care needs and expectations, and meaning-making beyond the caregiving experience. Participants described caregiving as emotionally demanding yet meaningful, with religion and spirituality fostering resilience, emotional relief, acceptance, and hope. The palliative care experience also contributed to a transformed understanding of death as a natural transition and increased appreciation of life. Despite recognizing spirituality as an essential component of holistic care, participants perceived institutional spiritual care as insufficient and expressed the need for greater spiritual support from healthcare professionals. Religion and spirituality were central resources that helped relatives cope with the emotional and existential challenges of the palliative care process while facilitating meaning-making and adaptation to death. The findings also highlight important unmet spiritual care needs, emphasizing the integration of structured, person-centered spiritual care into routine palliative care practice. Given the small, context-specific sample, these findings should be interpreted as exploratory and warrant confirmation in larger and more diverse qualitative studies.