Navigating Health and Illness through Spiritual Care: Practices, Challenges, and Transformations In Global Healthcare System.

In recent years, increasing attention has been given to the role of spirituality across global healthcare contexts. WHO recognised this dimension as early as the 1980s, defining spirituality as the non-material aspects of human life (such as beliefs, values, meaning, and ethics) which arise from individual and collective consciousness and influence health and human development within social and cultural contexts (WHO, 1984).

Despite this recognition, the implementation of spiritual care in healthcare systems remains limited, with few established models and low levels of integration into practice (De Luca et al.2025). One key challenge is the persistent ambiguity surrounding the definition of spirituality, often conflated with religion. This has also challenged its recognition among medical and healthcare professions (Puchalski et al., 2020), and the inevitable consequence is a "marginalisation" of the spiritual dimensions from healthcare practice.

However, since the Covid-19 pandemic, there has been renewed interest in spiritual care as a component of holistic healthcare. It is now increasingly recognised as important for supporting physical and mental wellbeing, particularly in chronic illness and end-of-life care (Best, 2024).

This session invites theoretical, empirical, and innovative contributions exploring the meaning, role, and development of spiritual care across healthcare systems. Some main issues are:

- Theoretical and empirical definitions of spiritual care;

- Biomedicine and spiritual care integration in healthcare contexts and practices;

- Patient, carers and Healthcare profession experiences of spiritual care;

- Spiritual care in chronic diseases, mental illnesses and end-of-life care;

- Spiritual care models and policies in different health systems.