In this paper, we evaluate the ethical challenges faced by Muslim healthcare professionals (HCPs) working in palliative and end-of-life care (P&EOLC) in the UK. Aiming to contribute to an empirical foundation on which ethical support systems for religious HCPs can be built, we compare Islamic moral frameworks with the secular ethics of the NHS (National Health Service) and assess how Muslim HCPs navigate the integration of both.This qualitative study includes 76 semistructured interviews with Muslim patients, family members and a variety of Muslim and non-Muslim palliative care providers. Important themes were the central role of Islam, Islamic beliefs and values surrounding P&EOLC, and difficulties in navigating multiple moral frameworks resulting in significant moral distress among Muslim HCPs.Our study reveals a pressing need for better ethical support systems for religious HCPs and more inclusive workplaces in healthcare. We suggest developing ethical guidance incorporating religious perspectives, offering cultural and religious competence training to staff, and establishing peer support groups to aid Muslim HCPs in aligning their professional duties with their faith, preserving their integrity and well-being. We recommend future research focuses on gathering more empirical data from diverse Muslim populations, developing effective ethical support mechanisms and studying their impact.
Classical bioethics examines moral issues in terrestrial medicine and the life sciences. According to Konrad Szocik, space bioethics merely relocates those questions to harsher environments. We argue that this view is incomplete: space bioethics is a genuinely original domain. Unprecedented conditions-chronic radiation exposure, partial gravity, closed ecologies, long communication delays, and severe resource constraints-reconfigure risk and responsibility. Survival-oriented interventions-human bio-enhancement, human-machine integration, germline editing for adaptation and off-world reproduction (potentially via ectogenesis)-pose dilemmas with no close terrestrial analogue. Moreover, some technologies may be developed and adopted in space before diffusion to Earth, generating ethical challenges in advance. These scenarios strain the portability of standard moral norms and cannot be addressed by simply importing frameworks from military or extreme-environment medicine.

