Beyond Empathy: Kapwa, Pakikiramdam, and the Relational Foundations of Spiritual Care among Filipino Health Professionals

ABSTRACT Spiritual care is an important dimension of holistic healthcare. However, prevailing understandings of spiritual care have largely emerged from Western healthcare traditions and may not fully reflect culturally grounded understandings of care in other contexts. In the Philippines, spirituality occupies an important place in personal and communal life, yet little is known about how Filipino health professionals understand and enact spiritual care. This study explored the lived experiences and perceptions of Filipino health professionals regarding spirituality and spiritual care. Using a descriptive qualitative approach with an interpretative phenomenological orientation, data were collected through fifteen focus group discussions involving forty-one health professionals from multiple disciplines. Data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis supported by a modified Guided AI Thematic Analysis (GAITA) framework. Participants rarely described spiritual care as a discrete intervention or primarily as a religious activity. Instead, they portrayed it as a progressively developing relational process through which patients’ deeper concerns became recognizable within relationships characterized by presence, listening, trust, accompaniment, and responsiveness to experiences of suffering, hope, and meaning. Participants’ accounts further suggest that the indigenous Filipino concepts of kapwa (shared personhood) and pakikiramdam (relational discernment) provide culturally grounded interpretive frameworks for understanding how spiritual care is recognized and enacted within clinical practice while remaining guided by appropriate professional boundaries. These findings extend contemporary discussions of relational care by demonstrating how indigenous Filipino perspectives contribute to culturally responsive approaches to spiritual care, patient-centered practice, and health professions education.