Considering the ethnic, racial, and cultural diversity in the U.S., we aim to explore the experiences of healthcare chaplains as they provide culturally sensitive care to diverse patients and their families.

This is a qualitative study. Individual interviews were conducted with 14 healthcare chaplains recruited from 3 U.S. chaplaincy organizations.

Thematic analysis with constant comparison yielded 6 themes in the chaplains’ experiences: (1) the diverse roles of chaplains; (2) their high levels of comfort in working with diverse populations, attributed to cultural sensitivity and humility training; (3) cues for trust-building; (4) common topics of diversity, equity, and inclusion discussed; (5) gaps in chaplaincy training; and (6) the importance of collaboration and negotiation with healthcare professionals to accommodate cultural needs.

This research highlights the valuable role of chaplains in providing culturally sensitive care and suggests areas for improving chaplaincy training and education to better serve diverse patient populations.

Skilled medical interpreters are essential to providing high-quality, culturally sensitive palliative care and addressing health-care disparities for patients with limited English proficiency (LEP). While the benefits of utilizing medical interpreters are well documented, interpreter roles and experiences in palliative care are unique and poorly defined. This narrative review examines the extant literature on medical interpreters in palliative care to define their unique roles and describe their experiences and recommendations.

A narrative literature review was completed through systematically searching the following databases: Medline, Embase, Web of Science, and CINHAL. Title and abstract screening was completed, followed by full-text review.

Ten articles met inclusion criteria and were included in the review. Medical interpreters play several roles in palliative care for patients with LEP including interpreting language and meaning, acting as a cultural broker, and advocating for patients and families. Medical interpreters report being comfortable interpreting palliative care discussions; however, they face challenges in navigating their complex roles and the emotional impact of palliative care encounters. Their recommendations to improved palliative care encounters involving medical interpreters are careful language choice, holding pre- and post-meetings, education for interpreters and health-care professionals, and further integrating the medical interpreter into the interprofessional team.

Medical interpreters play several complex roles when participating in palliative care encounters for patients with LEP. Understanding these roles and the experiences allows medical interpreters to be better integrated into the interprofessional team and enhances the ability to provide quality, culturally sensitive palliative care for patients with LEP. Further research is required to understand how implementing the recommendations of medical interpreters impacts patient outcomes.

There is growing recognition of the importance of increasing preparedness for and the provision of palliative care in humanitarian crises. The primary objective of this review is to interpret the existing literature on culture and palliative care to query the recommendation that humanitarian healthcare providers, teams, and organizations integrate palliative care into their practice in ways that are attentive to and respectful of cultural differences.

A critical interpretive synthesis was applied to a systematic literature review guided by the PRISMA framework. Analysis was based on directed data extraction and was team based, to ensure rigor and consistency.

In total, 112 articles covering 51 countries and 9 major worldviews met inclusion criteria. This literature describes culture as it influences perspectives on death and dying, expectations of palliative care, and challenges to providing culturally sensitive care. A key pattern highlighted in articles with respect to the culture and palliative care literature is that culture is invoked in this literature as a sort of catch-all for non-white, non-Christian, indigenous practices, and preferences for palliative care. It is important that humanitarian healthcare providers and organizations aiming to enact their commitment of respect for all persons through attention to potential culturally specific approaches to pain management, suffering, and dying in specific crisis settings do so without reproducing Othering and reductionistic understandings of what culturally sensitive care in humanitarian crises settings involves.

This paper clarifies and unpacks the diverse influences of culture in palliative care with the goal of supporting the preparedness and capacity of humanitarian healthcare providers to provide palliative care. In doing so, it aids in thinking through what constitutes culturally sensitive practice when it comes to palliative care needs in humanitarian crises. Providing such care is particularly challenging but also tremendously important given that healthcare providers from diverse cultures are brought together under high stress conditions.