Journal of Pharmacy (Jul 2021)
Religion, spirituality and patient counselling: A scoping review
Abstract
Introduction: Religion and spirituality (R/S) have immense potential in influencing the effectiveness of patient counselling in the healthcare setting. Although substantial literature has studied the relation of religion, spirituality and health, a limited number of studies have investigated the effect of religious/spiritual practices in patient counselling. This study aims to review available qualitative research on the outcome of practising religion and spirituality in patient counselling through scoping review. Method: This scoping review collects the studies published from the year 2010 until 2020 written in English that were retrieved from PubMed and Scopus databases. Additional articles were retrieved from the Google Scholar through manual search. Synonyms and varied spelling were included in the search keywords to account for differences in spelling and word use in the United States and the United Kingdom. This review focus on the article’s presence with religion, spirituality, and therapeutic components. The methodology of this review was based on Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI). The abstract from 1162 articles retrieved from database search was screened and unrelated paper were excluded. Remaining 34 papers went through full-text screening and ten articles were selected. The thematic analysis was employed as the analytic method. Results: Five main themes that were produced from the thematic analysis of included studies which are “Conventional medical counselling”, “Association of religion and spirituality with medical counselling”, “Components of spiritual counselling”, “Challenges in applying spiritual care,” and “Recommendations to spiritual counselling”. Conclusion: The results from this scoping review can give some idea to health practitioners in improving the quality of patient counselling in healthcare setting. By incorporating religion and spirituality aspects in the patient counselling, it can improve patient’s understanding and adherence to their medication. This will result in achieving the desired pharmacotherapy outcomes and treatment goals.
