The study was led by Hazal Sonbahar Ulu of Akdeniz University, together with colleagues from Hacettepe University, Niğde Ömer Halisdemir University, and Ankara Etlik City Hospital. The team conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with nine patients aged between 58 and 87 who were hospitalized in the palliative care unit of a tertiary care hospital in Turkey. Rather than measuring meaning with standardized scales, the researchers used qualitative content analysis grounded in established thematic analysis methodology, allowing the patients’ own words and experiences to shape the findings. Ethical approval was obtained from the Ankara Etlik City Hospital Scientific Research Ethics Committee, and all participants gave written informed consent before taking part.

From those interviews, four interrelated themes emerged. Family, spirituality, hope, and psychological adaptation stood out as the primary sources of meaning, providing what the authors describe as emotional security, continuity, and resilience throughout the palliative care process. For many participants, the presence of relatives was not merely comforting but constitutive of their sense of self; being a parent, spouse, or grandparent remained a living identity even as illness stripped away other roles. Spiritual and religious practices similarly anchored patients, offering a framework in which suffering could be interpreted and the future, however uncertain, could be faced with equanimity.

The second theme concerned participation in daily occupations, a term occupational therapists use to cover everything from self-care to leisure and social engagement. Patients in the study drew meaning from ordinary activities: holding conversations with visitors, watching television, performing religious practices, and maintaining other meaningful routines. These occupations supported psychological stability, but the researchers found they were frequently constrained by two forces. The first was functional decline, as advancing illness eroded the physical capacity needed to do even simple things. The second was the structure of the care environment itself, which offered few organized opportunities for activity. In other words, patients often wanted to remain engaged with life but found the setting worked against them.

That environmental dimension formed the third theme. Supportive relationships with healthcare professionals fostered trust and emotional comfort, reinforcing patients’ sense that they were still persons worth caring for rather than bodies to be managed. Conversely, noise, shared rooms, lack of privacy, and limited communal spaces hindered engagement and undermined well-being. This finding aligns with a growing body of research on environmental design for end-of-life care, which has shown that institutional settings can either buffer or amplify the distress of advanced illness. The Turkish study adds a patient-voiced perspective, emphasizing that a ward’s acoustics and architecture are not cosmetic concerns but active ingredients in the experience of meaning at the end of life.

The fourth theme reached into the past. When patients reflected on the roles and occupational identities they had held before illness, as workers, caregivers, and active members of their communities, they revealed both continuity and disruption of self. Some participants managed to carry forward a coherent narrative in which their present suffering was woven into a lifelong story; others experienced the loss of function as a rupture that made meaning-making harder. This tension between continuity and disruption highlights a central challenge of advanced illness: the body changes faster than identity can adapt, and care systems rarely provide structured support for that adaptation.

The findings arrive at a moment when palliative care worldwide is shifting away from a purely biomedical model toward holistic approaches that address physical, psychological, social, and spiritual needs together. Meaning in life has been identified as a key determinant of quality of life in advanced illness, and systematic reviews of meaning-centered interventions have shown promising results. Yet, as the authors note, patient perspectives on how meaning is actually constructed within inpatient settings have remained underexplored. By listening directly to patients in a Turkish tertiary hospital, the study fills a gap that quantitative measures of well-being often obscure: the texture of what makes daily life worth living when cure is no longer the goal.

The practical implications are concrete. The authors argue that integrating occupation-focused interventions, spiritual care, and environmental modifications within palliative care services may help preserve continuity, dignity, and emotional well-being. In practice, this could mean occupational therapists designing adapted activities that let patients continue valued routines despite physical limitations, chaplains and nurses systematically addressing spiritual needs rather than treating them as optional extras, and hospital architects prioritizing privacy, quiet, and communal spaces where patients can gather with families. A recent scoping review of occupational therapists’ roles in palliative and hospice care suggests this workforce remains underutilized, and the new study provides qualitative evidence for why expanding it matters.

The study’s limitations are those inherent to its design. With nine participants drawn from a single palliative care unit in one Turkish hospital, the findings cannot be generalized across cultures, care settings, or illness trajectories. Qualitative research aims for depth and trustworthiness rather than statistical representativeness, and the authors followed established criteria for rigor in thematic analysis, but they acknowledge that future multicenter and longitudinal studies are needed to examine meaning-making across different contexts and disease courses. Such work could test whether the four themes identified here, family, spirituality, hope, and adaptation, hold stable over time or shift as patients move between hospital, hospice, and home.

Even so, the study’s central message resonates far beyond its sample. Faced with terminal illness, people do not simply surrender meaning; they actively rebuild it from the materials available to them, the love of family, the consolation of faith, the stubborn persistence of hope, and the quiet dignity of a familiar routine. The phrase that gives the study its title, a patient’s declaration that life still has meaning, captures a finding that clinicians and hospital administrators would do well to take seriously. Palliative care that treats meaning as a clinical target, alongside pain and symptom control, may not extend life, but the evidence increasingly suggests it can transform its quality. In a field where the outcome is ultimately the same for every patient, that transformation may be the most meaningful metric of all.

Subject of Research: Sources of meaning in life among inpatient palliative care patients

Article Title: “Life still has meaning for me!” Exploring sources of meaningful life among palliative care patients: a qualitative study

Article References: Sonbahar Ulu, H., Güney Yılmaz, G., Baysal Yiğit, A., Cesur, E. M., Sarışen, Ş., Bozkuş, R., & Şahin, S. (2026). “Life still has meaning for me!” Exploring sources of meaningful life among palliative care patients: a qualitative study. Supportive Care in Cancer, 34(10), Article 972. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00520-026-11189-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00520-026-11189-6

Keywords: palliative care, meaning in life, spirituality, qualitative research, occupational therapy, quality of life, patient perspectives, end-of-life care, psychological adaptation, hospital environment, occupational identity, hope