Center to Advance Palliative Care

CPE training will certainly minimize risk of any ethical violations coming from a multi-faith or secular environment. Most problems occur in systems that use volunteer and/or unsupervised chaplains from the community. We have committed to a full chaplain FTE to cover all palliative admissions which allows for assessment of every patient. I think this should be the standard for palliative care but recognize that most programs cannot yet commit to this financially. Meanwhile I think it is the chaplain's role to educate the nursing staff to provide a sensitive screening of spiritual needs in order to provide the most appropriate referrals to the professional chaplains. Imho - best point of insertion would be at the initial family meeting to establish goals of care.