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Chaplaincy in Palliative Care Settings

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Post spiritual care professionals
Author: maryg
Date: Jun 30, 2009 9:50 am
I am reviewing our program for how we are meeting the NQF standards for prefered practice. #22 refers to Spiritual care professionals trained and certified in Palliative care. To what certification would this be refering to? Does any one know. Thanks for the help
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Re:spiritual care professionals (by jdurnil on 06/30/2009)
I looked closely at #22 of the NQF document. I too am not sure what that is referring to. I have been the Chaplain with our palliative care team for 8 years. I have not come across anything that might be that specific. I know that it says that the spiritual care provider should be certified in palliative care. But I wonder if it simply might mean that the spiritual care provider be a board certified chaplain.

If anyone else has any thoughts or insights, I too would like to know. Thanks
+ Re:spiritual care professionals (by ghandzo on 06/30/2009)
Preferred Practice #22 might be called an "aspirational" goal. That is, while it is desirable and "should" happen, it cannot happen at the moment because there is no certification in palliative care for professional chaplains at the moment. There is a movement underway to contruct such a program. It will likely presume Board Certification. That is, one will have to be a BCC before one can be eligible for certification in this specialty. In the mean time, there is a major white paper whose executive summary will be published in the fall(Puchalski, CM, Ferrell, B, Otis-Green, S, et al. 2009 (in press). Improving the quality of spiritual care as a dimension of palliative care. Journal of Palliative Medicine). This paper will give a great deal more specificity to the roles and skills appropriate to professional chaplains on palliative care teams.

The Rev. George Handzo, BCC
Vice President
Pastoral Care Leadership & Practice
HealthCare Chaplaincy
New York, NY
Re:spiritual care professionals (by Tim_Ford on 06/30/2009)
The 'spiritual care professionals' implies board certified (or eligible) professional chaplains. The additional 'trained and certified in Palliative care' indicates that palliative chaplains should be able to demonstrate a higher level of palliative expertise and experience than what is typically given for board certification. Until formal certification is more widely available, simply asking for a chaplain with significant years of clinical experience seems to be the norm in our market (i.e. local hospices are now asking for 2-3 years of end-of-life clinical focus in their job descriptions). Another option is the certification in Thanatology from the Association for Death Education and Counseling (www.adec.org) which has an active chaplain membership.
There are also numerous training opportunities that do not lead towards formal certification, but can demonstrate similar levels of expertise. I'm thinking of City of Hope's ACE Project, the Upaya Institute's Being with Dying training, George Washington University's End-of-life care educational programs, etc...

Tim Ford, MA MS CT
Palliative Care Chaplain
Thomas Palliative Care Unit
VCU Massey Cancer Center
Richmond, VA
+ Re:spiritual care professionals (by hospicescc on 07/21/2009)
We have exploredt this requirement in our local region. We have decided to utilize he Association for Death Education and Counseling as our certification process. They have a Certificaton in Thanantology and a Fellow of Thanantology. Both require a working knowledge of the dying and grief processes.

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