Integration of religion in community health and wellbeing interventions is important for achieving a good life among faith-based populations. In countries hosting Muslim-minorities, however, relatively little is reported in academic literature on processes of faith integration in the development and delivery of interventions. We undertook a review of peer reviewed literature on health and wellbeing interventions with Muslim-minorities, with specific interest on how Islamic principles were incorporated. Major databases were systematically searched and PRISMA guidelines applied in the selection of eligible studies. Twenty-one journal articles met the inclusion criteria. These were coded and analyzed thematically. Study characteristics and themes of religiosity are reported in this review, including the religious tailoring of interventions, content co-creation and delivery design based on the teachings from the Quran and Sunnah, and applicability of intervention structures. We reviewed the philosophical and structural elements echoing the Quran and Islamic principles in the intervention content reported. However, most studies identified that the needs of Muslim communities were often overlooked or compromised. This may be due to levels of religio-cultural knowledge of persons facilitating community health and wellbeing interventions. Our review emphasizes the importance of intellectual apparatus when working in diverse communities, effective communication-strategies, and community consultations when designing interventions with Muslim-minority communities.

Muslims have a strong sense of obligation in which Islam informs their ways of life. As a religious minority within Australia, these obligatory practices may not be well understood by mainstream policy, health, and welfare services. This mixed-method, cross-sectional study assessed the self-reported quality of life (QoL), worldviews, and subjective experiences of religiosity and/or cultural identity of adults from a Muslim community affiliated with the Adelaide Mosque, metropolitan South Australia. Data were collected during the COVID-19 pandemic using the Multicultural Quality of Life Index (MQLI) and focus group discussions. Survey results (n = 98) showed women had lower MQLI scores than men did, and married participants had better MQLI scores than not-married did. Focus group participants (n = 18) reported feeling overwhelmed and isolated due to social distancing requirements during the COVID-19 pandemic, compounded by a lack of available ‘Muslim-friendly’ social support services. While results do not represent all Muslim perspectives in Australia, they reveal a dialogic interchange between gender and matrimonial differences, and cultural variances that may exist in the concept of wellbeing. Greater opportunities for social support integrating Muslim religiosity and culture in multicultural practice, in discrete and mainstream services, would benefit this South Australian community.

Professional quality of life (ProQOL) refers to workers’ subjective feelings associated with work involved in helping others who have experienced trauma. It consists of positive and negative aspects, that is, subscales of compassion satisfaction, and burnout and secondary traumatic stress. Foster and kinship caring inherently involves risks associated with exposure to the trauma responses of children in their care. This exposure can lead to poor ProQOL, carer attrition, and placement instability. While limited studies specifically explore ProQOL of carers, many studies have examined factors and interventions related to ProQOL. However, there is a lack of synthesis of these studies. To fill such a research gap, we undertook a scoping review of 70 empirical studies from Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, published from 2012 to 2022 reporting on ProQOL, and its related factors and concepts. We applied a multilevel ecosocial construct to examine complex interrelationships between private and governance settings to better understand factors related to ProQOL of carers and interventions aimed to improve it in these dynamic systems. In our review, some studies showed positive outcomes for carers, such as reduced stress or burnout associated with training. However, there was insufficient attention to factors associated with ProQOL at relational and sociopolitical levels. It is crucial to improve carers’ ProQOL or well-being to ensure their retention and placement stability. Long-term systemic improvements require interventions across different levels of the system.

Undertaken in Kolkata, India, our study aimed to explore the experiences of Bengali middle-class women on perceived stressful events, social support, and coping experiences following childbirth. Becoming a mother following childbirth is a shared phenomenon irrespective of culture, social strata, or country, while stress during the postpartum period or depression is not. Discrete medical intervention does not sufficiently address the complexities of postpartum experiences since influencing factors also include economic, political, cultural, and social backgrounds. Adopting a feminist and phenomenological approach, individual in-person interviews were conducted with twenty women recruited via snowball sampling. Our findings revealed that events experienced as stressful may lead to poor postpartum well-being. Underpinned by gendered discourse and biases, stressful events included familial imperatives for a male child, poor social and emotional support from the family, mostly partners and fathers, and systemic workplace barriers. The women in our study commonly resided with their mothers postpartum. They expressed feeling sheltered from these experiences, cared for, and supported. We discuss the women’s experiences from a feminist pragmatic worldview, which advocates for a flexible feminism recognizant of the unique and nurturing relationship experiences between Bengali middle-class women and their mothers. In conclusion, we advocate for culturally sensitive, women-centered postpartum care practices that may entail the inclusion of intergenerational care during this critical phase of maternal well-being. These insights underscore the necessity of tailoring postpartum support systems to align with the cultural and familial contexts of the individuals they serve.

In recent years, social network analysis has had its own distinctive theoretical and methodological underpinnings. This article proposes a novel method for the application of a fused mixed-methods approach and social network analyses that incorporates the critical aspects of numerous characteristics of children’s social development in a statutory care setting. We collected data from children involved in the Mockingbird Family out-of-home care model, following its implementation in Australia. Our approach involves three steps: social-developmental network indicators, relational dynamics, and social-developmental network narrative. We contend that this approach has the potential to provide powerful data representation that facilitates the understanding of the complexities of children’s social development, the links between different positions and roles of children, and their social network in the Mockingbird family. Using exemplars, we show the potential of the research method to unearth rich data for seeking to understand the system change important for strengthening children’s safe and protective environments.