At University Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri, hospitalizations for COVID had been high in January, notes NPR local correspondent Gina Kaufmann. Medical teams once again had to keep physical contact to a minimum. For hospital chaplains, this means that their only direct contact with patients may be over the phone in the room. Doing this makes it difficult to establish a connection, let alone meet a patient’s spiritual needs. In a medical team, a chaplain represents that person they can “talk to, someone to cry with, someone who knows how hospitals work,” Kaufmann writes. For family members and loved ones, they are there to listen and help them decide what to do in a state of stress and confusion.
To provide a picture of how these interactions can work, Kaufmann shares a story told to her by Ramona Winfield, chaplain for the palliative care team at University Health.
Winfield tells her about being called to a room where a non-COVID patient had died. Upon entering the room, she saw that a grieving relative had climbed into bed next to the deceased. The parent was oblivious to what the nurse standing next to the bed was telling him. Winfield immediately entered the parent’s line of sight and the nurse moved away. She made a few silent attempts to start a conversation without results. She decided to change her approach. After standing there quietly for a while, she began to sing a peaceful song. The family member started crying.
“He was just laying there and crying. And I took a handkerchief, and wiped away the tears as I sang. And then the family member started talking,” Winfield told Kaufmann. He spoke to his deceased relative, not Winfield, and said his goodbyes.
Then she calmly explained to the grieving relative that soon someone from security would be coming to bring the body to the morgue and that he only had a few minutes left to be with the body of his deceased relative. The family member replied “okay”. As Winfield stood in the background continuing to hum his song, the man picked up a towel and wiped the patient’s face, hands and feet.
“While he was doing this, the family member would say, ‘You’ve done so much with these hands, taking care of your family. You’ve worked hard,'” Winfield told Kaufmann. “And while he was wiping the feet, he was like, ‘These feet have traveled so many miles just to make sure your kids have everything they need. “”
“After being immobilized by grief when Winfield arrived, the relative left the room in peace, on his own terms,” Kaufmann explains.
In a June 2020 article, during the early days of the COVID outbreak, when such media coverage was rightly focused on our remarkable hospital first responders, I mentioned how an important service rendered was being overlooked: the role of the hospital chaplain. Father Radu Titonea, chaplain at the Long Island Jewish Forest Hills Hospital, was mentioned at the time. Given the overwhelming stress on doctors, nurses, technicians and those responsible for keeping the hospital clean and functioning, Fr Titonea admitted he often has to turn his attention to checking mental well-being Staff. As for dealing with death and grief caused by a raging pandemic, he emphasized how well experienced hospital chaplains are in dealing with uncertainty. “We live in this world where people don’t know what’s going to happen to them,” he said.
“Chaplains are non-anxious, non-judgmental people who have the ability to stay still, especially in a place…it’s not a still place,” Allison Kestenbaum, certified educator and supervisor at the University of California, San Diego Health’s Spiritual Care & Clinical Pastoral Education, describes the role of a chaplain in a recent San Diego Union Tribune article. They try to recognize the humanity of every person they meet.
Although much has changed since 2020, there remains a lack of recognition of the contribution these Spiritual Advisors have made and are making as full members of a hospital healthcare team. According to Zippia, a career data website, there are more than 9,600 chaplains currently employed in the United States. It is clear that not all hospitals offer specialized pastoral care. It is said to be taught very little in seminaries and religious institutions. Chaplains are typically certified by one of many bodies such as the Board of Chaplaincy Certification, a national 501(c)(6) nonprofit affiliate of the Association of Professional Chaplains. According to Kestenbaum, despite the work they face on a daily basis, chaplains have one of the lowest burnout rates in health care.
“While chaplains are often an integral part of hospital care teams, their role is not widely understood, even by hospital staff,” reports Cathi Douglas of the San Diego Union Tribune. “Often it is assumed that chaplains only deal with openly religious patients and families, but chaplains say they are there for everyone, regardless of their religious tradition – even if they have no faith… And even if patients and their families cannot specifically ask for religious advice, chaplains can offer them the most essential service they need: a listening ear.”
Jonathan Rudnick is a rabbi and community chaplain with Jewish Family Services who visits patients at various hospitals in the Kansas City metropolitan area. “People almost always come to hospitals for the physical,” he tells NPR. “They have a problem and they need/want to fix it… The unintended consequence is: things get very out of balance with all this focus on the physical. Something has to physically heal. At the same time, it’s like, ‘And the rest of me?’ We are multidimensional creatures and when one dimension is so tightly bound, the others can get lost.”
Tracy Balboni is chief medical officer at the Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women’s Cancer Center and professor of radiation oncology at Harvard Medical School. She is also the lead author of a recently published study by Harvard researchers on the role of spirituality in health care. “Our findings indicate that attention to spirituality in critical illness and health should be an essential part of future person-centered care,” she says.
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