The stakes of this question are enormous. According to the World Health Organization, roughly ten percent of hospitalized patients in high-income countries experience adverse events during their care, a figure that climbs to twenty-five percent in low- and middle-income settings. The WHO estimates that unsafe care contributes to approximately 134 million incidents each year and around 2.6 million deaths worldwide. In response, the organization’s Global Patient Safety Action Plan 2021–2030 identified patient and family engagement as a central strategy for reducing avoidable harm. The theoretical foundation for this approach comes from a widely cited framework by Carman and colleagues, which describes engagement as a continuum ranging from simply receiving information to active partnership and shared decision-making. The new study set out to discover where critically ill cardiac patients and the nurses who care for them actually stand on that continuum.

The research team conducted an exploratory qualitative study in an eight-bed coronary intensive care unit at a public hospital in Rio de Janeiro, where nursing handover already takes place twice daily, at seven in the morning and seven in the evening, supported by a structured communication instrument. Between October 2023 and May 2024, a doctoral researcher conducted individual semi-structured interviews with 22 nursing professionals, comprising eight nurses and fourteen nursing technicians, and 16 hospitalized patients. Patients were eligible only if they had been in the unit for at least 48 hours and had experienced at least four handovers, and only if they were clinically stable, able to communicate, and free of cognitive impairment. Interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim in Portuguese, and analyzed using inductive thematic content analysis, producing 450 thematic recording units that were distilled into 15 meaning units and ultimately four themes. Data collection ended when empirical saturation was reached, meaning additional interviews no longer generated new concepts.

The first major finding was that the nursing professionals genuinely valued bedside handover. They described how seeing the patient directly allowed them to check devices, verify clinical information, and catch risks that might otherwise slip through the cracks. One nurse explained that the model had helped reduce safety incidents precisely because the patient could be visualized, citing the example of a patient exposed to the risk of falling from bed. The structured script functioned as a memory aid, ensuring that all important points were covered. Crucially, several professionals acknowledged that patients themselves could serve as an additional safeguard. One nurse noted that patients often know everything happening to them and had sometimes corrected or added information. A nursing technician described how simply asking patients about allergies could prevent adverse events, information that might never surface through documentation alone.

Yet the professionals were deeply ambivalent about inviting patients into the conversation. The second theme, drawing on 135 recording units, exposed a web of barriers that went well beyond logistics. Communication was the most prominent concern: acronyms, biomedical jargon, and unexplained clinical expressions could confuse patients or, worse, terrify them. One nurse recounted a patient who was shocked because he believed he was HIV positive after mishearing an abbreviation. Professionals also questioned whether all information should be shared at the bedside, worrying that details about bleeding, severe prognoses, or uncertain medical decisions could cause emotional distress. Organizational constraints compounded the problem: handover must remain dynamic and efficient, the unit’s open layout with beds separated only by screens offered little privacy, and some patients suffered from confusion or confinement syndrome that made participation difficult or impossible.

The third theme revealed what professionals believed would be needed to make participation work. Rather than rejecting the idea outright, they called for a structured model with clear criteria about what information should be communicated at the bedside and what should be discussed separately among professionals. Training emerged as a non-negotiable prerequisite: staff wanted to understand the purpose of patient participation, how to invite patients, how to use plain language, and how to avoid psychological repercussions. Some suggested informational videos to support adherence. Perhaps most tellingly, professionals recognized that patients would need explicit encouragement to participate, proposing that nurses end each handover by asking whether the patient had questions or wanted to add anything. Participation, they concluded, is not spontaneous; it depends on an opening deliberately created by the nursing team.

The fourth and most striking theme came from the patients themselves, who demonstrated only limited familiarity with the handover happening at their own bedsides. Most understood it as a conversation among professionals to update the incoming team, not as a moment in which they could take part. Their willingness to engage varied enormously. Some feared emotional distress or embarrassment, with one patient saying he would feel ashamed to listen, and another noting that hearing difficult news could be devastating for patients whose treatment had not gone well. Others were interested in listening, asking questions, or correcting overlooked details. But the most powerful finding was that several patients did not perceive themselves as legitimate participants at all. One declared that participation was simply not his role because he was just the patient, while another said the meeting belonged to the professionals, not to him. Many said they would participate only if explicitly invited.

The study’s central conceptual contribution lies in its sharp distinction between bedside handover and participatory handover. Bedside handover changes where communication occurs; participatory handover requires changes in how communication occurs, by intentionally incorporating patients as active contributors to the exchange of information. Because this study was conducted in a setting where bedside handover was already embedded in routine practice, the findings shift the debate from whether the practice should be adopted to how it can evolve. Physical presence, the authors argue, should never be interpreted as evidence of meaningful engagement. Interpreted through Carman’s engagement framework, patient participation in this unit remained largely at the initial stages of the continuum: patients were present and occasionally informed, but rarely encouraged to contribute or share responsibility for communication.

The findings also carry important implications for the Brazilian healthcare context, where patient engagement has only recently become an explicit priority in national safety policies and where hierarchical communication traditions and biomedical culture remain influential. The authors caution that professionals’ concerns should not be read as resistance to innovation but as an attempt to balance the benefits of participation with ethical and clinical responsibilities, including confidentiality and emotional protection. Trust emerged as a double-edged factor: confidence in professionals made patients feel safe, but sometimes reduced their sense that their own contributions could improve care. The authors argue that trust and participation should be understood as complementary rather than competing values.

Ultimately, the study concludes that participatory handover should not be imposed as a standardized requirement but offered as a flexible communication strategy tailored to each patient’s preferences, health literacy, communication abilities, and clinical condition, ensuring that every patient has the opportunity, but never the obligation, to take part. Implementing this vision, the researchers emphasize, is a system-level intervention requiring institutional guidance, staff training, leadership commitment, and organizational cultures that value dialogue and shared responsibility, rather than leaving the decision to individual discretion. The study’s limitations, including its single-unit setting and the absence of family perspectives, mean the findings are context-specific, but their message resonates globally: the patient lying at the center of the bedside handover will only find a voice when the healthcare system deliberately makes room for one.

Subject of Research: Patient participation in nursing handover in a coronary intensive care unit

Article Title: Patient Participation in Nursing Handover in a Coronary Intensive Care Unit: A Qualitative Study

Article References: Santos, G. R. D. S. D., Duarte, S. D. C. M., Campos, J. F., & da Silva, R. C. (2026). Patient Participation in Nursing Handover in a Coronary Intensive Care Unit: A Qualitative Study. Nursing Open, 13(9), Article e70802. https://doi.org/10.1002/nop2.70802

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1002/nop2.70802

Keywords: patient participation, nursing handover, bedside handover, intensive care, patient safety, patient-centred care, qualitative research, coronary care, communication, Brazil, nursing, patient engagement

The research team, led by Henrik Pedersen of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and St. Olavs University Hospital in Trondheim, set out to measure patient satisfaction among adults who had recently been diagnosed with ADHD at an outpatient mental health centre, and to identify which factors were most closely associated with that satisfaction. Between April 2017 and January 2019, the researchers recruited 56 adults from the outpatient centre, all of whom had recently received an ADHD diagnosis. The study was designed and reported in accordance with the Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology (STROBE) statement, and ethical approval was granted by the Regional Ethical Committee in Norway.

To quantify satisfaction, the researchers used the Client Satisfaction Questionnaire-8, a widely validated eight-item instrument in which higher scores reflect greater satisfaction with services received. ADHD symptom severity was assessed with the six-item Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale, a brief screening and severity measure rooted in the diagnostic criteria of the DSM. General self-efficacy—the belief in one’s own capacity to manage challenges—was measured with an abridged six-item General Self-Efficacy scale adapted for ADHD. Finally, the perceived quality of diagnosis-specific information was captured with a single item previously used in earlier research, asking patients to rate how satisfied they were with the information they had received about ADHD itself.

The headline finding was striking in its specificity. The sample’s mean score on the CSQ-8 was 24.1, a level the authors characterise as medium satisfaction. More concerning, 42.9 percent of participants reported being satisfied only ‘to a small extent’ or ‘not at all’ with the information they had received about ADHD. In other words, nearly half of the newly diagnosed adults felt shortchanged on the very knowledge that could help them understand and manage their condition. When all candidate variables were entered into a multiple linear regression model, satisfaction with ADHD-related information emerged as the only variable significantly associated with overall patient satisfaction, with a standardised beta coefficient of 0.71—an unusually strong relationship in health services research, where effect sizes of this magnitude are rare.

The statistical architecture of the study deserves attention. A standardised beta of 0.71 indicates that a one standard deviation improvement in perceived information quality was associated with a 0.71 standard deviation increase in overall satisfaction, holding constant demographic characteristics, symptom severity, self-efficacy, and the other covariates in the model. Taken together, the full regression model explained 43 percent of the variance in overall patient satisfaction—an adjusted R-squared of 0.43, which is substantial for a model predicting a subjective outcome in a clinical population. Variables that one might intuitively expect to matter, such as how severe a patient’s ADHD symptoms were or how confident they felt in managing daily life, did not reach statistical significance once information quality was accounted for.

Why would information quality loom so large? The authors point to the psychological stakes of receiving a diagnosis in adulthood. Many adults diagnosed with ADHD have spent decades grappling with underachievement, unstable employment, strained relationships, or co-occurring anxiety and depression without understanding why. Psychoeducation—the structured provision of information about a condition, its causes, its treatments, and its practical management—is considered a cornerstone of good clinical care in adult ADHD. When that component is thin, rushed, or poorly tailored, patients may leave the diagnostic process with a label but no roadmap, undermining their confidence in the entire service. Conversely, clear, comprehensive, and empathetic information delivery may validate the diagnostic experience itself, signalling that the clinic understands the patient’s needs and is invested in their long-term outcomes.

The Norwegian context adds an important layer to the findings. Norway’s public mental health services are universally accessible and generally well resourced, meaning that the information gaps identified in this study are unlikely to reflect outright scarcity of services. If nearly 43 percent of patients in a high-income, well-organised system report inadequate information about their new diagnosis, the finding is a sobering benchmark for health systems elsewhere. It also aligns with a broader literature on patient-centred care, which has repeatedly shown that informational needs are among the most commonly unmet dimensions of care across chronic conditions, from diabetes to cancer to psychiatric disorders.

The researchers are careful to flag the limitations of their design. The cross-sectional nature of the data means that causality cannot be established: it is possible, for instance, that patients who are more satisfied with their care overall are also inclined to rate the information they received more favourably, rather than information quality driving satisfaction. The sample size of 56, while adequate for the regression analyses performed, is modest and drawn from a single outpatient centre in mid-Norway, raising questions about generalisability to other regions, health systems, and diagnostic pathways. The single-item measure of information quality, though pragmatic and grounded in earlier research, cannot capture the multidimensional nature of psychoeducation—its timing, format, comprehensiveness, or the degree to which it invites dialogue rather than passive receipt.

Nevertheless, the practical implications are difficult to ignore. If the association holds in future longitudinal and interventional studies, then improving the quality, quantity, and accessibility of diagnosis-specific information could be one of the most efficient levers available for raising satisfaction among adults newly diagnosed with ADHD. Concrete steps might include structured psychoeducation programmes delivered at or shortly after diagnosis, written and digital resources tailored to adult learners, repeated opportunities to ask questions as understanding deepens, and routine assessment of informational needs as part of clinical quality monitoring. Such measures are relatively low-cost compared with pharmacological or psychological interventions, and they target a dimension of care that patients themselves appear to weigh heavily.

The study also carries a message for the growing number of adults seeking ADHD assessment worldwide, as referral rates climb across Europe and North America. Diagnosis is not an endpoint but a doorway, and what patients carry through that doorway—knowledge, understanding, and a sense of being informed—may shape their entire trajectory of care. As Pedersen and colleagues conclude, the association between satisfaction with diagnosis-specific information and overall patient satisfaction among adults with ADHD now warrants deeper investigation, with longitudinal designs and larger, more diverse samples needed to determine the direction and nature of the relationship. Until then, the Norwegian data offer a clear, actionable hint to clinicians: when it comes to satisfying newly diagnosed adults with ADHD, telling them what they need to know may be the most powerful intervention of all.

Subject of Research: Patient satisfaction and its associated factors among newly diagnosed adults with ADHD in Norway

Article Title: Patient satisfaction and its associated factors in newly diagnosed adults with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: a cross-sectional study in Norway

Article References: Patient satisfaction and its associated factors in newly diagnosed adults with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: a cross-sectional study in Norway. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12888-026-08632-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12888-026-08632-7

Keywords: ADHD, patient satisfaction, adult psychiatry, psychoeducation, patient-centred care, mental health services, CSQ-8, cross-sectional study, quality of care, informational needs, self-efficacy, Norway

The scale of the problem remains staggering. Sepsis, the life-threatening organ dysfunction caused by a dysregulated host response to infection, continues to rank among the leading causes of death worldwide, accounting for millions of deaths each year despite major advances in recognition and management. Global estimates of hospital-treated sepsis underscore the enormous incidence and mortality burden, and the economic consequences extend far beyond the acute hospital stay. Survivors frequently require prolonged rehabilitation, recurrent healthcare use and long-term nursing support, and many lose their independence entirely. Epidemiological studies from Germany, for example, have documented the substantial costs and care dependency that follow sepsis hospitalization, painting a picture of a condition whose true burden is measured in years, not days.

Crucially, mortality statistics capture only part of that burden. A growing body of evidence shows that increasing numbers of sepsis survivors experience persistent cognitive impairment, physical disability, psychological distress and markedly reduced quality of life. Landmark follow-up studies of patients who survived acute respiratory distress syndrome, a condition closely intertwined with sepsis in the intensive care unit, revealed functional disability persisting five years after critical illness, while systematic reviews have shown that many critical illness survivors struggle to return to employment, with lasting psychosocial consequences. These findings suggest that success in sepsis care should be measured not only by survival but by the quality and meaning of that survival for patients and their families, including the often-overlooked burden carried by caregivers, who face psychological, physical, social and financial challenges of their own.

The editorial also emphasizes a clinical reality that is frequently obscured by the language of emergency medicine: sepsis is not always an isolated and reversible disease process. For some patients, it represents a transient physiological insult from which meaningful recovery is expected. For others, it may be the final manifestation of advanced malignancy, severe frailty, end-stage organ failure or another life-limiting condition. In such situations, aggressive organ support and life-sustaining therapies may prolong life without achieving outcomes that patients would consider acceptable. Recognizing this heterogeneity, the authors argue, is essential when defining treatment goals and evaluating whether ongoing interventions remain appropriate. A one-size-fits-all approach that maximizes physiological parameters in every patient risks delivering care that is technically successful but profoundly misaligned with individual values.

To address this, the authors propose viewing sepsis and septic shock as a trajectory rather than a single event. During the acute phase, which generally covers the first several hours after recognition and extends through the first 24 to 72 hours, survival remains the primary objective. Early recognition, rapid diagnosis and prompt initiation of evidence-based therapies are essential, and the campaign’s guidelines have extensively addressed this phase over the last 25 years. Patients and families should be involved in decision-making whenever possible, even though this is often difficult during the initial stages of critical illness, when both families and clinicians typically prioritize survival. Still, the editorial stresses that even in the acute phase clinicians should consider whether initiating life-sustaining treatment is consistent with the patient’s wishes and values, a point of particular ethical weight because not starting treatment is often perceived as less difficult than withdrawing it later.

The acute phase is followed by a period of ongoing critical illness that may last for days or weeks, depending on the patient’s clinical course. During this stage, clinicians must reassess prognosis, treatment options and the balance between the burden of interventions and the likelihood of meaningful recovery. Patient goals and values should be revisited as clinical circumstances evolve, linking medical interventions to outcomes that are meaningful to patients rather than focusing solely on survival. The authors point to the concept of goal-directed health care, which redefines health and health care in the era of value-based medicine, and to consensus frameworks from other acute specialties, such as stroke, that have already embedded goal-concordant care into quality improvement standards. Such an approach, they argue, may strengthen therapeutic relationships, support shared decision-making and improve adherence to treatment plans.

Culture, communication and belief systems occupy a central place in this vision. Cultural identity encompasses not only ethnicity, language and religion but also family structures, values and beliefs about illness, death and healthcare itself. Care plans should address patients’ preferences, life goals and cultural context, and healthcare systems may need culturally specific resources to bridge communication gaps and support equitable care. The editorial cites the multinational ETHICATT study, which demonstrated that religion and religiosity significantly influence end-of-life decisions and patient autonomy in intensive care units across different countries, and in some settings religious beliefs may also shape the legal and ethical dimensions of end-of-life decision-making. Effective, structured communication is presented as fundamental throughout the entire course of sepsis, ensuring that patients and families are informed, heard and able to participate in decisions aligned with the patient’s goals and values.

Yet the evidence suggests this component of care remains underdeveloped. Research on sepsis hospitalizations has documented persistent deficits in the identification of patient goals and in the delivery of goal-concordant care after discharge. Prognostic uncertainty, time pressures and the traditional focus on physiological stabilization contribute to delayed conversations about treatment preferences. Policy statements from the American College of Critical Care Medicine and the American Thoracic Society have established shared decision-making as a standard in intensive care, and practical guidance on evidence-based ICU family conferences and the fine-tuning of family partnerships in decision-making provide clinicians with tested frameworks. Evidence also indicates that involving palliative care specialists can improve communication, facilitate decision-making and reduce potentially non-beneficial interventions without compromising quality of care, including for older adults hospitalized with septic shock. The editorial’s conclusion is unambiguous: communication should be considered a core component of high-quality sepsis management rather than an adjunct to it.

As patients enter the recovery phase, attention must shift toward functional outcomes, quality of life and psychological well-being, with comprehensive rehabilitation and follow-up programs recognized as essential components of recovery after sepsis. The authors acknowledge that the 2026 Surviving Sepsis Campaign guidelines have already moved in this direction, including Good Practice Statements in areas where high-certainty evidence is difficult to generate, and offering recommendations on goals-of-care discussions, advance directives, time-limited trials, palliative care and long-term outcomes. But they argue that future guidelines should go further, giving greater prominence to outcomes such as functional independence, cognitive performance, psychological well-being and caregiver burden. Where evidence is limited, recommendations may appropriately be informed by professional standards, ethical principles, patient values and societal goals, a stance the authors insist does not weaken evidence-based medicine but increases its transparency. The future of sepsis care, they conclude, lies not in departing from evidence-based medicine but in expanding it toward value-informed, goal-centred care, in which survival remains vital but is recognized as only one of several outcomes patients may value, alongside dignity, meaningful relationships, freedom from prolonged suffering and symptom control.

Subject of Research: Patient-centred, goal-concordant sepsis care within the Surviving Sepsis Campaign guidelines

Article Title: Surviving Sepsis Campaign beyond survival: aligning sepsis care with patient goals

Article References: Kesecioglu, J., Metaxa, V., & Azoulay, E. (2026). Surviving Sepsis Campaign beyond survival: aligning sepsis care with patient goals. Intensive Care Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00134-026-08590-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00134-026-08590-4

Keywords: sepsis, septic shock, Surviving Sepsis Campaign, intensive care, shared decision-making, palliative care, goals of care, patient-centred care, post-sepsis morbidity, critical illness recovery, end-of-life care, clinical guidelines

The study focused on Australia and New Zealand, contexts that the authors note are underrepresented in a literature dominated by American data. Participants included 21 people with a Christian background and lived experience of an eating disorder, and 16 eating disorder healthcare providers, with six individuals belonging to both groups. Recruitment proceeded through media announcements, professional organisations and personal contacts. All participants first completed an initial survey, from which 31 were purposively selected to ensure demographic diversity and invited into semi-structured interviews averaging 73 minutes in length. The transcripts were then subjected to thematic analysis, a qualitative method that identifies recurring patterns of meaning across accounts rather than testing predetermined hypotheses. The result is not a measure of how often faith matters in eating disorders, but a rich map of how, when and why it does, and why clinicians so often avoid the topic altogether.

Three major themes emerged from the analysis, and the first was labelled by the researchers with an evocative phrase: relevance, or ‘an elephant in the room’. For many, though not all, participants, religion and spirituality were deeply intertwined with personal identity, worldview, and the risk and recovery dynamics of their eating disorder. Some patients described faith as a source of guilt or perfectionism that fed disordered eating; others described it as a wellspring of hope, meaning and unconditional worth that sustained them through treatment. The study’s central contention is that when clinicians overlook this dimension entirely, they may miss opportunities to personalise care and may even create miscommunication, for example by dismissing values that a patient regards as central to who they are. Importantly, the authors are careful to note that not every participant considered religion relevant to their illness or care, a nuance that guards against any suggestion that faith should be imposed on treatment conversations.

The second theme, reservations, captured under the phrase ‘wearing gloves’, describes the barriers that keep religion and spirituality out of clinical dialogue. These barriers operated at multiple levels. Patients and providers alike reported uncertainty about whether such topics were appropriate to raise at all, and if so, how to raise them without crossing professional or personal boundaries. Some clinicians worried about lacking the training or language to discuss faith competently, or feared that raising religion might be experienced as proselytising. Systemic factors compounded the hesitation: time-pressured consultations, treatment frameworks that do not include spiritual assessment, and institutional cultures that treat faith as private rather than clinical territory. The metaphor of wearing gloves captures a defensive posture, a handling of a sensitive subject at arm’s length that protects the clinician but may leave the patient’s actual struggles unexplored.

The third theme, responses, described as ‘working with’ faith, documented the occasions when religion and spirituality did find their way into care. Participants described experiences in which clinicians explored a patient’s religious and spiritual struggles and supports, and in some cases integrated explicitly Christian resources into treatment. These could include conversations about guilt, forgiveness and body image framed within a patient’s own theological commitments, engagement with faith communities as recovery supports, or collaboration with chaplains and spiritually integrated psychotherapists. Accounts of such integration were mixed, with participants reporting both helpful and unhelpful experiences, but the study suggests that when done respectfully and at the patient’s initiative, attention to faith could strengthen therapeutic alliance and address suffering that standard protocols did not reach.

The technical backdrop to these findings is a growing body of evidence that the authors situate their work within. Emerging research indicates that many patients would like healthcare providers to enquire about their religious and spiritual beliefs, and that spiritually integrated psychotherapies may be as effective as traditional therapies for a range of mental health conditions. Eating disorder care currently leans heavily on structured modalities such as cognitive behavioural therapy and dialectical behaviour therapy, which are powerful but not universally effective, and which rarely include formal space for spiritual concerns. The study’s abbreviations list, spanning anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, binge eating disorder, avoidant restrictive food intake disorder and other specified feeding or eating disorders, underscores the diagnostic breadth across which this gap may matter. The authors argue that for a subset of patients, faith is not an optional extra but a load-bearing structure of the self, and that treatment which ignores it is, by definition, less individualised than it could be.

On the strength of their findings, the researchers propose a clinical framework designed to support healthcare providers in considering religion and spirituality, and in some cases incorporating Christian resources, in eating disorder care. While the published version details the framework’s steps, its logic follows directly from the three themes: first, establish relevance by asking open, non-presumptive questions about whether faith matters to the patient; second, address reservations by normalising the conversation, clarifying consent and boundaries, and acknowledging the clinician’s own uncertainty; and third, where appropriate, work with the patient’s faith, drawing on their own religious supports and, where requested and suitable, Christian resources. The framework is explicitly patient-led, distinguishing respectful exploration from religious imposition, and it is intended to be usable by general practitioners, psychologists, dietitians and other members of multidisciplinary eating disorder teams rather than only by chaplains or specialist pastoral carers.

The study’s limitations and scope deserve emphasis. It examined Christian religion and spirituality specifically, in Australian and New Zealand settings, and its 31 interviewees were recruited partly through personal and professional networks, so the findings are exploratory rather than representative. Qualitative thematic analysis illuminates mechanisms and meanings, not prevalence, and the authors do not claim that faith is relevant to most patients with eating disorders. Nor do they claim that religious involvement is uniformly protective; the accounts collected include ways in which religious contexts can heighten struggle, for instance through perfectionism, shame or unhelpful teachings about the body. What the study does establish is that for a meaningful subset of patients, the intersection is clinically significant in both directions, and that the current silence around it is a choice of the system rather than a reflection of patients’ lived reality.

The broader significance of the work lies in its challenge to whole-person care. Eating disorders devastate health through medical, psychological and social pathways, and treatment guidelines increasingly call for individualised, multidisciplinary approaches. This study adds a dimension to that agenda: if identity, meaning and worldview shape both illness and recovery, then a healthcare system that never asks about them is operating with an incomplete map. The authors suggest that acknowledging and exploring individual religious and spiritual perspectives may enhance care for some patients, and their framework offers a concrete starting point for clinicians who have lacked both permission and method. As eating disorder services grapple with demand that outstrips capacity and outcomes that remain stubbornly poor, the study’s message is that some of the missing leverage may lie in conversations that medicine has been too cautious to begin, conducted with the gloves off, at the patient’s own pace, and on the patient’s own terms.

Subject of Research: The role of Christian religion and spirituality in eating disorder healthcare

Article Title: A missing dimension? Christian religion, spirituality and eating disorder healthcare: a qualitative study

Article References: Thomas, H., O’Callaghan, C., Best, M., Bräutigam, M., Kimber, T., Wade, T., & Sturman, N. (2026). A missing dimension? Christian religion, spirituality and eating disorder healthcare: a qualitative study. Journal of Eating Disorders. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40337-026-01770-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40337-026-01770-z

Keywords: eating disorders, Christianity, religion, spirituality, qualitative research, whole-person care, spiritually integrated psychotherapy, anorexia nervosa, healthcare providers, patient-centred care, missing, dimension