‘Obviously, you can’t outright ask’: what are the barriers and facilitators to discussion of spiritual health within social prescribing? A study using semi-structured interviews
Ishbel Orla Whitehead, Mark Adley, Alexandra Thompson, Philip Mordue, Amy O’Donnell, Barbara Hanratty · 2025
Read ‘Obviously, you can’t outright ask’: what are the barriers and facilitators to discussion of spiritual health within social prescribing? A study using semi-structured interviews by Ishbel Orla Whitehead, Mark Adley, Alexandra Thompson, Philip Mordue, Amy O’Donnell, Barbara Hanratty (2025) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-12801478.txt.
Description
Ishbel Whitehead and co-authors ask why spiritual health rarely comes up in social prescribing in a 2025 study. Social prescribers connect patients to community support beyond medicine, and their holistic brief includes spiritual needs. Twelve prescribers were interviewed for an hour each.
Faith groups were used mainly as venues for practical help, not spiritual care. Prescribers blurred spiritual and mental health together and worried that raising faith could offend or harm vulnerable patients, so they waited for patients to bring it up. When patients did, prescribers felt open to helping. Comfort, confidence, and fear of deep conversations decided whether the topic surfaced at all.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Ishbel Orla Whitehead, Mark Adley, Alexandra Thompson, Philip Mordue, Amy O’Donnell, Barbara Hanratty |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2025 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 38 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |