Center to Advance Palliative Care

Role of chaplains in improving health care examined as demand increases

New publication from The Hastings Center offers perspectives on the professionalization of health care chaplaincy and the challenge of assessing spiritual care services

(Garrison, NY) The number of certified chaplains working in hospitals and other health care settings is increasing, as is demand for their services. A set of essays, published in the current issue of the Hastings Center Report and available for free on the Hastings Center’s web site, looks at chaplains’ multifaceted role and explores challenges, such as the need to standardize practices and establish benchmarks of quality in their area of patient care.

The five essays grew out of Professional Chaplains and Health Care Quality Improvement, a research project of The Hastings Center in collaboration with HealthCare Chaplaincy. Nancy Berlinger, codirector of the project, is the deputy director and a research scholar at The Hastings Center. The project, which was funded by the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, also included a focus group study involving chaplains in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Phoenix.

The essay set was structured in response to requests from chaplains for short, clear pieces they could share with colleagues and hospital administrators to prompt fresh conversations about patient-centered care and the role of chaplains in providing that care. Board-certified chaplains complete at least 1,600 hours of supervised clinical training in hospital-based programs in addition to academic training.

In an essay titled, “What Are We Doing Here? Chaplains in Contemporary Health Care,” Martha R. Jacobs, project codirector, answers basic questions, such as what is spiritual care in the context of health care. “While any caregiver can tend to the spiritual needs of a suffering person, the chaplain is the health care professional expert in providing spiritual care,” writes Jacobs, a board-certified chaplain with HealthCare Chaplaincy.

In other essays, Margaret E. Mohrmann, a professor of biomedical ethics at the University of Virginia, proposes a set of professional ethics for chaplaincy that draws on its foundations in health care and in theology. A plan for chaplains to describe how they contribute to the ongoing task of quality improvement in health care is outlined by authors Raymond de Vries, a sociologist of health care at the University of Michigan School of Medicine, Wendy Cadge, a sociologist of religion at Brandeis University, and Nancy Berlinger.

Two essays take a closer look at the role of chaplaincy in quality improvement. Martin L. Smith, director of clinical ethics at the Cleveland Clinic, compares the contributions of chaplains and clinical ethics consultants. Nancy Berlinger explains why it makes good tactical sense for chaplaincy to commit to patient-centered care as their profession’s quality improvement goal.

The full text of the essay set can be downloaded from http://www.thehastingscenter.org/uploadedFiles/Publications/nov-dec%2008%20essay%20set.pdf

The Hastings Center is a nonpartisan bioethics research institution dedicated to bioethics and the public interest since 1969. The Center is a pioneer in collaborative interdisciplinary research and dialogue on the ethical and social impact of advances in health care and the life sciences. The Center draws on a worldwide network of experts to frame and examine issues that inform professional practice, public conversation, and social policy.