As the US continues to welcome refugees and immigrants, the healthcare system needs to evolve to be able to provide person-centered care to such individuals.

Physician associates (formerly physician assistants) are clinicians who pride themselves in spending adequate amounts of time with patients and ensuring comprehensive care is provided. This patient-centered care is grounded in the training for physician associates (PAs). The accrediting body for PA schools mandates that the curriculum contain instruction on providing care to patients with consideration for different religions/spiritualities among other identifiers such as ethnicity/race, disability status, and social determinants of health. Collaboration with religious studies departments can enhance PA student education on spiritually competent patient care.  

With the help of an Interfaith America grant, Religion and Health Curriculum Grant, the leaders of the Franklin College PA and religious studies programs partnered to provide religious literacy training for PA students. The students were given a background in the importance of religious literacy in healthcare settings and recorded interviews with religious minority groups in the area conducted by Dr. Alexander.  Our interview partners consisted of Hindu, Muslim, and Chin Christian couples in Central Indiana.  As a capstone experience for the end of the semester, students applied the newly learned information to fictional patient case studies with the assistance of many of the interview partners so that they could provide real-time feedback to the students from their own religious perspectives. 

The insights from the interviews revealed to the students that many religious minorities are more likely to be immigrants or refugees, introducing cultural differences and language barriers as potential additional challenges in caring for these patients. Students learned that religious observances and preferences are not only dependent upon one’s gender identity, but also the geographic region that patients or their families are from, the variety of ethnicities within those geographic regions, dietary restrictions, and more.  This particular interfaith (and interdisciplinary) project pushed us all, professors and students alike, to develop more questions about what effective patient-centered care looks like for religious minorities in the Midwest.   

We discussed the different barriers to care patients can face given their social, economic, and racial backgrounds when those factors run into bias and prejudice in a healthcare setting.  However, patients from religious minorities may find those barriers to be even more significant due to cultural differences, language hurdles, and alternative views on medicine.  We analyzed how overlapping identities of inequality (a theory known as intersectionality) is important for healthcare providers to keep in mind, especially when caring for patients who belong to a religious minority.   

A disposition of respect toward a patient’s religious identity was the foundational step toward a more open and trusting patient-provider relationship.

As educators, we are trained to check the pulse of our classrooms, to know when to slow down, reassess, or present information in a different way.  When we tackled the complexity of religious identity in healthcare settings, there were times in which we sensed the students were overwhelmed, as if they felt they needed to learn everything about the world’s religions (on top of their clinical knowledge!) just to be a compassionate healthcare provider.  However, we cautioned students to view religious literacy as a tool in building an effective rapport with their patients.  While we emphasized the need to seek out resources about different religions, we also stressed that an openness to learning about how a patient’s religious background may intersect with their care plan can be the first step in gaining and maintaining the trust of patients who may be at the most vulnerable juncture of their lives.  In fact, almost all of our interview partners agreed that a disposition of respect toward a patient’s religious identity was the foundational step toward a more open and trusting patient-provider relationship.  

With evolving international crises, a more and more diverse nation, and increases in antisemitism and Islamophobia in the United States, it is more important now than ever for clinicians to understand that patient-centered care must include an openness toward learning about how a patient’s religious identity may impact their care plan.  After all, we never have the option of leaving part of ourselves at the door when entering a clinical setting seeking care; and the more medical providers seek to acknowledge the importance and complexity of religious identities in their patients, the fewer barriers to care there will be.