V O L U M E 3 8 , N O . 6 • November-December 2008

THE HASTINGS CENTER

Can we measure good chaplaincy?A new professional identity is tied to quality improvement

Reprinted from

A set of essays from the November-December 2008 issue of the Hastings Center Report.

Can We Measure Good Chaplaincy?

The essays collected here examine the “professionalizing” profession of chap-laincy, the goal of patient-centered care, and the special challenges of defin-ing, measuring, and improving quality in less-standardized areas of health

care delivery. The essays emerge from the research project, Professional Chaplainsand Health Care Quality Improvement, which was undertaken collaboratively byThe Hastings Center and HealthCare Chaplaincy, a multifaith, not-for-profit centerfor pastoral care, education, research, and consulting. The project was made possibleby a generous grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

—Gregory E. KaebnickEditorHastings Center Report

H A S T I N G S C E N T E R R E P O R T 1November-December 2008

It can be really hard—or really easy—to explain whatI do for a living. Chaplains share academic trainingwith clergy, but we complete clinical residencies and

work in health care organizations. Our affinities are withthe patient and family, but we may also chair the ethicscommittee or serve on the institutional review board,and we spend a lot of time with staff. We must demon-strate a relationship with an established religious tradi-tion (in my case, United Church of Christ), but we servepatients of all faiths, and of no faith, and seek to protectpatients against proselytizing. We provide something thatmay be called “pastoral” care, “spiritual” care, or just“chaplaincy”—but even among ourselves, we do not al-ways agree about what that thing is.

There are many, many definitions of “spiritual care” inthe context of health care.1 They all tend to have some-thing to do with transcendence: how the suffering indi-vidual grapples with issues of identity, meaning, and pur-pose. They may or may not be expressed in terms of reli-

gion or culture. While any caregiver can tend to the spir-itual needs of a suffering person, the chaplain is thehealth care professional expert in providing spiritualcare.2

Chaplains do what needs to be done, in the setting inwhich they find themselves, to ensure that care is focusedon the emotional and spiritual needs of the patient andthe patient’s family, particularly in times of suffering,stress, or grief. When I worked as the solo chaplain in acommunity hospital, I was paged to the emergency roomfor codes. If the patient did not survive, I would help thenurses clean the body—and also the room—as part ofcaring for the grieving family, who were about to come inand say their goodbyes. I had learned from experience tosee this scene through their eyes: Had we treated theirloved one with respect? Had we tried hard enough? Inthat job, I also became experienced at translating thesigns and symptoms of imminent death for families sit-ting by the bedside: What is happening to the body asthe organs are shutting down? What do those lines andnumbers on the monitor mean? Why does the breathingsound like that? Nurses and physicians know these thingswithout having to think about them; the chaplain isoften the one who observes what the family does notknow, and who offers comfort by explaining what can beexplained.

And sometimes, we sit with the patient and familyand say nothing. Our presence seems to comfort them,and remind them that they are neither alone nor forgot-ten during this most difficult time.

Sometimes, too, chaplains do what needs to be donesimply by showing up, hanging around, and makingtime for staff. Sitting with staff, even joking with them,may help them defuse and debrief after a difficult clinicalsituation. A chaplain tends to know if a particulardeath—an unexpected death, or the death of a well-likedpatient—was a hard death for a team, and will check inwith them. Sometimes the staff members for whomchaplains make time are senior administrators, who relyon chaplains to help them keep the patient, and the fam-ily, and the staff, and the community in mind, lest any beforgotten in the ever-tightening reimbursement market.In my community hospital, our CEO had me sit in on

What Are WeDoing Here?Chaplains in Contemporary Health Care

B Y M A R T H A R . J A C O B S

ESSAYS

Martha R. Jacobs, “What Are We Doing Here? Chaplains in Contempo-rary Health Care,” Hastings Center Report 38, no. 6 (2008): 15-18.

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all disclosures of medical errors: as he put it, my presence inthe room was a reminder that the institution took the pa-tient’s and family’s suffering seriously. Among ourselves, chap-lains may consider this a part of our “prophetic” role, al-though it is a role we do not always claim for ourselves.

There was a time when chaplains got their jobs by defaultbecause they could not lead a congregation. This may saysomething about how religious denominations used to viewthe care of the sick: as a fall-back option, rather than as a vo-cation in its own right. Today, professional chaplains—likephysicians, nurses, mental health professionals, and socialworkers—are called to care for the sick and the suffering: thisis where we all want to be; this is our vocation. From the per-spective of “religion,” chaplaincy is a specialized form of min-istry: our academic training is in seminary, and after receivinga masters-level graduate education, we complete at least 1,600hours of supervised clinical pastoral education training in anaccredited, hospital-based program and demonstrate ourcompetency in twenty-nine different areas.3 For example, wemust have a working knowledge of the psychology and soci-ology of religion and be attentive to the diversity of culture,gender, sexual orientation, and spiritual and religious practiceamong patients and families.4 We are also trained to assess pa-tients’ spiritual and religious resources and needs and to workwith them on the specific issues and concerns that arise whena person is hospitalized. The goal of our specialized, hospital-based training is to prepare chaplains to work in “intensemedical environments.”5 Very intense: professional chaplainstypically work in end-of-life care, in the intensive care unit,and in trauma. The chaplain is the one staff member whosejob description allows her to sit with a dying patient, or witha grieving family, as long as needed. The nurses and physiciansmay want to do this, but they have to move onto other pa-tients, other families, other needs.

Sitting with a dying patient or a grieving family is not onlyintense: it is also time-intensive. If a hospital defines “quality”as “making the numbers”—that is, counting the number ofvisits—and a chaplain spends five hours with one family inthe ER, as I did more than once during traumas, then thechaplain’s numbers are not going to look good. And this isone of the challenges chaplaincy faces as it professionalizes: dowe define quality as quantity, care as customer service? (Thatwould make some administrators very happy.) Or do weclaim that prophetic role, and use it to advocate for betterhealth care? And can we make the case that better health careincludes better care of the whole person, with attention to therole of religion and culture in a patient and family’s ability tocope with illness? Can we make the case that better healthcare includes better care of the whole staff as well?

Like other health care professions, the structure of con-temporary health care chaplaincy is shaped in part by thestandards of the Joint Commission, which accredits and cer-tifies more than fifteen thousand health care organizationsand programs in the United States. To satisfy standards thatrecognize a patient’s “right to have his or her cultural, psy-chosocial, spiritual, and personal values, beliefs, and prefer-

ences respected,” and that require hospitals to accommodatepatients’ “right to pastoral and other spiritual services,” hospi-tals may hire one or more professional chaplains, with theone-person department being the norm even in some largehospitals.6 The Quality Commission of the Association ofProfessional Chaplains endorses a ratio of one chaplain forevery fifty patients hospitalized for more than three days, onechaplain for every seventy-five patients with shorter stays, andone chaplain for every one hundred outpatients undergoingdialysis, chemotherapy, and other procedures.7 However,these are not one-size-fits-all formulas, and hospitals of equiv-alent size serving similar populations may vary greatly in thesize of their professional chaplaincy staffs. As the Joint Com-mission does not specify that their standards must be met byprofessional chaplains, some hospitals, especially in rural areas,may rely on an on-call list of local clergy, or they may employa chaplain who has some pastoral care training but lacksboard certification.8 This is an acknowledged tension in ourprofession. While all chaplains are accustomed to workingwith local clergy, our colleagues in ministry are not usually ac-customed to working in “intense medical environments,” norare they trained to care for patients from religious traditionsother than their own. A chaplain who is not board-certifiedmay also lack training in the care of diverse patient popula-tions. We worry about practice variation just as other healthcare professionals do.

We also worry about job security. Most chaplaincy servicesare not reimbursed, so hospitals must choose to make the in-vestment in us.9 We tend to be a good return on investment.Press Ganey, a patient satisfaction survey used by approxi-mately two thousand of the five thousand hospitals in theUnited States, reports that patient satisfaction with how welltheir emotional and spiritual needs were met highly correlateswith their overall satisfaction.10 However, this presents anoth-er tension: the patients that chaplains spend the most timewith—dying patients—do not fill out patient satisfaction sur-veys. Therefore, we may not ever be graded on our best work.Are hospitals equally concerned about meeting the needs oftheir dying patients, as well as the needs of patients who re-cover? If so, there should be a better way to quantify whatchaplains do for patients.

Quality in end-of-life care and quality in chaplaincy are in-tertwined: we are—or should be—the people in any hospitalwho are genuinely good at death and dying. The NationalHospice and Palliative Care Organization’s Guidelines for Spir-itual Care in Hospice describes the hospice chaplain as “an in-tegral member of the hospice team” in charge of “the spiritu-al plan of care” that will be carried out by team members inresponse to the needs of a patient and family.11 Any patientmay experience troubling questions as part of a serious illnessor a major loss, whether that loss is a limb or a function (suchas mobility, memory, or language). These questions may beexpressed in religious or nonreligious terms. A patient of reli-gious faith may ask, What is the point of this suffering? A pa-tient with no religious faith may ask, How am I going to getthrough this? Sometimes, patients who do not have religious

H A S T I N G S C E N T E R R E P O R T 3November-December 2008

faith nonetheless use religious language, as this language maybe part of their culture. The chaplain helps the patient andfamily discuss the questions that matter most deeply to themand that may be essential for them to express candidly as theyconsider their treatment decisions, hopes, and fears.

What chaplains do is most needed and best used when apatient is dying, has a poor prognosis, or has suffered a life-al-tering loss. Terminally ill patients acknowledge a greater spir-itual perspective and orientation than other patients, and spir-itual care has been part of the hospice movement since St.Christopher’s was founded by Dame Cicely Saunders in1967.12 As hospice has moved “upstream,” with the recogni-tion by the palliative care move-ment that the values of hospicealso resonate with patients whoare living with chronic, progres-sive conditions but are not end-stage, chaplaincy has movedwith it. Many chaplains are nowmembers of their hospitals’ pal-liative care teams, helping thepatients served by these teamsgrapple with the encroachmentof disease or disability on life asthey have known it.

As chaplaincy has grown inprofessional training andstature, and as chaplains havegrown into our own profession,we recognize that we need tostandardize our practices, bothin the interest of quality and sothat we can negotiate with insti-tutions over funding and de-ployment. The six major chaplaincy cognate groups—theAmerican Association of Pastoral Counselors, the Associationof Clinical Pastoral Education, the Association of Profession-al Chaplains, the Canadian Association for Pastoral Practiceand Education, the National Association of Catholic Chap-lains, and the National Association of Jewish Chaplains—have created common standards for certification and a com-mon code of ethics, and are now working on practice stan-dards. HealthCare Chaplaincy and other organizations in ourfield are working on developing better ways to define andmeasure “quality” in the settings in which chaplains work—long-term care facilities and hospices in addition to varioustypes of hospitals.13 Empirically minded chaplains have calledon their colleagues to do more and better research into ourpatients’ spiritual needs so that we can legitimately claim pas-toral care as our area of expertise. These researchers remind usthat “chaplains must decide what questions to ask and how totry to answer them.”14 If we believe—and we do—that theusual patient satisfaction tools have not adequately reflectedour work, then we have a professional responsibility to devel-op tools that allow our contribution to health care quality im-provement to be assessed accurately and thus give us a basis

for further improvement. Compared to other health care pro-fessions, however, we do not undertake enough research, andwe do not write and publish enough. As managing editor ofPlainViews, an electronic newsletter read by more than 7,800chaplains worldwide, I am continually urging my colleaguesto put aside their reluctance to write about and claim whatthey do.

Part of the work of growing into a profession is bringingother professions into conversations. The essays that followgrew out of an October 2007 meeting at The Hastings Cen-ter that brought chaplains together with bioethicists, clini-cians, and health services researchers to discuss the role of

chaplaincy in efforts to improvehealth care. The set includes asociological account of chap-laincy, a critical perspective onthe ethical theories that mayground our practice, a call forchaplaincy to embrace patient-centered care as a concrete, in-terdisciplinary quality improve-ment goal, and a proposal forchaplaincy and clinical ethics towork together on QI. This essayset also includes a summary of afocus group study that askedchaplains something they hadnever been asked before: whatwe think about QI. May the di-alogue continue.

1. See the “principles of spiritualcare” in the National Hospice andPalliative Care Organization’s Guide-lines for Spiritual Care in Hospice,

(Alexandria, Va.: National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization,2001), 4.

2. Ibid., 5.3. There are also long-term care, congregation-based, and prison-

based CPE programs.4. Common Standards for Professional Chaplaincy, http://profes-

sionalchaplains.org/uploadedFiles/pdf/common-standards-professional-chaplaincy.pdf, accessed July 19, 2007.

5. J.L. Gibbons and S.L. Miller, “An Image of Contemporary Hospi-tal Chaplaincy,” Journal of Pastoral Care 43, no. 4 (1989): 355-61.

6. Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations,Comprehensive Accreditation Manual for Hospitals: The Official Hand-book (Oak Brook, Ill.: Joint Commission Resources, 2005), standardsRI2.10.2 and 2.10.4.

7. S.K. Wintz and G.F. Handzo, “Pastoral Care Staffing and Produc-tivity: More than Ratios,” Chaplaincy Today 21, no. 1 (2005): 4.

8. K.J. Flannelly, G.F. Handzo, and A.J. Weaver, “Factors AffectingHealthcare Chaplaincy and the Provision of Pastoral Care in the UnitedStates,” Journal of Pastoral Care and Counseling 58, nos. 1-2 (2004):127-30.

9. The Association of Clinical Pastoral Education establishes stan-dards, certifies supervisors (faculty), and accredits programs for clinicalpastoral education. The ACPE, Inc., is nationally recognized as an ac-crediting agency in the field of clinical pastoral education by the U.S.

Any caregiver can tend to thespiritual needs of the

suffering, but a chaplain isthe expert, helping the patient and the family

discuss the questions thatmatter most deeply to them.

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Secretary of Education through the Department of Education. Suchrecognition enables the ACPE, Inc., and/or its programs and students toparticipate in federal programs such as the International Student VisitorProgram, the veterans’ educational benefits program, Medicare Pass-Through reimbursement funding, and in some cases the federal studentloan deferment program. Recognition by the U.S. Department of Edu-cation requires regular and rigorous review of the agency and its stan-dards and processes for accreditation.

10. P.A. Clark, M. Drain, and M.P. Malone, “Addressing Patients’Emotional and Spiritual Needs,” Joint Commission Journal on Qualityand Safety 29, no. 12 (2003): 662.

11. National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization, Guidelines forSpiritual Care in Hospice, 5.

12. T.P. Daaleman and L. VandeCreek, “Placing Religion and Spiri-tuality in End-of-Life Care,” Journal of the American Medical Association284 (2000): 2515.

13. Other important centers of research on quality in pastoral care in-clude the Department of Religion, Health and Human Values at RushUniversity Medical Center, the Department of Pastoral Care and Edu-cation of the University of Pennsylvania Health System, and the De-partment of Chaplain Services at the Mayo Clinic.

14. A.J. Weaver, K.J. Flannelly, and C. Liu, “Chaplaincy Research: ItsValue, Its Quality and Its Future,” Journal of Health Care Chaplaincy 14,no. 1 (2008): 16.

Hospital chaplains do not have a monopoly on thespiritual care of patients, just as teachers do not havea monopoly on teaching. Spiritual care of the ill and

dying—compassionate and thoughtful attention to a patient’sexplanations of suffering, yearnings for transcendence, con-structions of meaning, expressions of faith or loss of it, re-

liance on prayer or ritual, bafflement, fear, hope, or any of themany other possible manifestations of spirituality in crisis—has long been within the domain of good nurses and gooddoctors. Nevertheless, spiritual care is the primary and ar-guably the sole focus of chaplains’ work, and just as we recog-nize a teaching profession even though “nonprofessionals”also teach, we can justifiably recognize hospital chaplaincy asa profession that specializes in spiritual care of patients—andthen turn to the task of specifying the defining criteria for theprofession, including its ethical grounding and governingtenets.

As chaplains acknowledge, physicians, nurses, and otherclinicians may—and often do—offer patients “spiritual” carethat attends to the deep questions of meaning, purpose, andconnection to others that arise during a serious illness. (Al-though some patients may frame their questions in religiousterms, it should be noted that “religious” is not a synonym for“spiritual,” but rather describes a sizable subset within the cat-egory of the spiritual.) The difference between chaplains andother clinicians is that chaplains are specialists in spiritualcare; it is what they do, rather than part of what they do.

Chaplains tend to distinguish themselves and their workfrom clinicians who also offer spiritual care by referring towhat they do as “pastoral” care. But for this distinction to rep-resent a salient difference, it will have to be explained. Oneway of understanding the distinction would be to regard spir-itual care as only vaguely or incidentally (if not tendentiously)religious, whereas pastoral care hones in on the specific reli-giousness of the patient. This understanding would highlighta potential difficulty lurking for an avowedly “interfaith” pro-fession in its use of the term “pastoral,” a word closely tied tothe Christian tradition’s fondness for shepherd imagery.

Alternatively, is the spiritual care provided by clinicians aform of screening only, perhaps with some empathic connec-tion added, and are chaplains then the professionals equippedto take the conversation further, into realms of assessmentand some analogous sort of therapy? Adept practitioners ofancient moral philosophies, such as Stoicism and Epicure-anism, understood and often referred to their teaching astherapy. They seem to have considered their therapeutic taskto be identification (diagnosis) of the student/patient’s specif-ic “disease”—his particular erring thoughts and bad habits—followed by provision of appropriate bracing, life-altering the-ories and methods intended to redirect and heal the suppli-cant.1 If chaplaincy seeks to be something more or other thana form of palliation, then an analysis of the ways in which thepractice is and is not intended to be therapeutic may be use-ful for elucidating professional goals and methods. It is alsothe case that a language of therapy will affect, for good andfor ill, the communication bridge of translation and interpre-tation that is sometimes necessary when justifying the pres-ence of clerical professionals within a secular health care insti-tution.

Thus, one fundamental challenge for the nascent profes-sion of chaplaincy is to assert that which not only defines butalso distinguishes the kind of care provided by trained and

B Y M A R G A R E T E . M O H R M A N N

Ethical Grounding for aProfession of HospitalChaplaincy

Margaret E. Mohrmann, “Ethical Grounding for a Profession of Hospital Chap-laincy,” Hastings Center Report 38, no. 6 (2008): 18-23.

H A S T I N G S C E N T E R R E P O R T 5November-December 2008

certified chaplains. Theologian John Cobb’s admonition isrelevant here:

The pastor’s task is to be present with and to “hear” the suf-ferer, to let the parishioner know that expressing fear, anger,and loneliness is acceptable. I do not dispute the validity ofthis approach, which in many cases is no doubt the best onepossible.

The question of why can be appropriately understood anddealt with psychologically, but to treat it only that way failsto take the questioner with full seriousness as a humanbeing. A pastor who has not reflected about the question,who has nothing to say, has atruncated ministry.2

Cobb is referring here to aclergyperson’s response to aparishioner asking difficult ques-tions about God in the face ofsuffering—questions also likelyto be encountered by hospitalchaplains. He distinguishes be-tween psychologically significantmethods of presence and accep-tance and the more specificallypastoral task of reflective re-sponse to the questions them-selves. He thereby provides away of expressing the distinctionbetween, on the one hand, the“spiritual” care that may also beoffered by other clinicians, andon the other, chaplains’ profes-sional “pastoral” care. The impli-cation is that chaplains’ claim tooffer “pastoral” care entails an obligation to provide care withsubstantive content, reflecting their professional educationand training—care that includes but goes beyond the comfortof a listening ear.

Defining what hospital chaplains do—and whether “pas-toral” is an appropriate adjective for the sort of care theygive—is one fundamental task inherent in becoming a recog-nized profession. The move toward “professionalizing” alsobrings with it the need for professional ethics. This require-ment raises not only the question of what the specific ethicaltenets of chaplaincy are or should be, but also a more basicquestion about what constitutes its theoretical grounding:How and on what basis should professional ethics for hospi-tal chaplaincy be conceptualized? In what follows, I considera few approaches to answering this basic question, none ofwhich is likely to be the winning response and each of whichlikely should have a place in a fully formulated chaplaincyethic.

Chaplaincy Ethics as a Form of Medical Ethics

Is a professional ethic for hospital chaplaincy better under-stood as a theological-religious ethic for a particular kind of

health care professional, or as a health care ethic for a particu-lar kind of theological-religious-pastoral professional? Themultiple alternative terms employed in that question pointout a complication attributable to the interfaith designationof chaplaincy. The interfaith commitment constrains any re-liance by the profession on the settled ethical frameworks ofspecific religious traditions and suggests that chaplaincy mustlook beyond the religious stances of its practitioners to con-

sider how the practice itself, lo-cated in and defined by the pro-vision of medical care, shapesand even determines the profes-sion’s ethical obligations.

This issue, however, bringsup a significant distinction be-tween chaplains and otherhealth care professionals. Doc-tors, nurses, pharmacists, andrespiratory therapists are eachpart of a single profession.Nurses, with rare exceptions,are nurses only; the nursingprofession is their one source ofprofessional obligation. Hospitalchaplains, on the other hand,are members of two profes-sions: They are ordained or oth-erwise officially recognized astrained leaders by their faithtraditions (a requirement forboard certification as a hospital

chaplain), and are thus members of the clerical profession.They are also members of this newly forming profession ofhospital chaplaincy, which is seeking to establish itself assomething other than a variant wholly subsumed within theclergy. Hospital chaplains then have differing, and potentiallyconflicting, moral obligations entailed by their adherence totwo relatively distinct professions—an issue I explore furtheronly after setting out ways in which chaplaincy ethics andmedical ethics may coincide.

What are the similarities between the ethics characteristicof faith traditions and the professional ethical understandingsthat govern nurses, physicians, and clinical therapists of vari-ous sorts? Clearly each formulation is identifiably ethics, sinceeach is concerned with, among other things, how we conductourselves, interact with one another, and care for those de-pendent on us. When situated within the health care setting,each insists on the primacy of the patient. Medical ethicstends to ground the patient’s central status in general princi-ples of respect for persons and in more specific, relationship-generated obligations of care for others’ well-being. Theologi-cal or religious ethics tends to base similar principles and

Chaplains are obligated toprovide care with substantive

content, reflecting their professional education and

training—care that includesbut goes beyond the comfort

of a listening ear.

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obligations on claims about common humanity, with or with-out reference to a creator-god, and on (divine) injunctions tolove others. But the two ethical frameworks are agreed onmuch that might be called an ethic of caring for patients, thepractice that forms the large area of overlap in the work ofthese professions.

Another way in which these versions of professional ethics,and others, are similar is in the matter of multiple fidelitycommitments. Both clinicians and chaplains have personalobligations—to self, family, and friends—that at times rivalthe call to attend to patients. Chaplains and health care pro-fessionals alike have moral obligations toward the institutionof which they are a part, and these, too, may at times conflictwith other professional commitments.

But obligations within each profession may also conflict.Physicians may find that their commitment to the care of apatient conflicts with important duties to train future doctorsor to carry out research likely to be of benefit to others. Goodand compelling imperatives to educate and to create newknowledge do not simply fade away upon hearing of the pri-macy of the patient’s need. Part of a physician’s professionalethical obligation is to find the morally appropriate balanceamong his or her commitments in each situation. Chaplains,too, have obligations to their profession of chaplaincy—in-cluding the education of future practitioners—that may onoccasion interfere with optimal care of the patient. Both clin-ical and clerical professionals find themselves in the positionof deciding between the need of the trainee to gain experienceand the need of the patient for the most experienced caregiv-er. It does not help either profession to have a code of ethicsthat speaks only of the primacy of the patient without regardto how this necessary balance is to be recognized and managedmorally.

Some health care professionals struggle with whether theirwork is or should be governed primarily by the ethical codesof their profession or by their “personal” ethic, which is oftenbased on religious beliefs. Current controversies surroundingconscientious objection to providing certain legal medicaltreatments indicate that professional ethical assertions andpractitioner behaviors do not track together in every instance.

However, this marks a point at which the problem of mul-tiple fidelity commitments diverges for chaplains, whose posi-tion within two professions complicates the issue further. Re-gardless of the interfaith aspirations and intentions of the pro-fession of chaplaincy, its practitioners are situated—not onlyby personal belief, but by prior training and professional initi-ation—within a specific faith tradition that compels their al-legiance. The conflict between chaplains’ professional obliga-tions to patients and their professional obligations to theirown faith tradition is not equivalent to the conflict of profes-sional and personal ethics characteristic of clinician dilemmas.For clinicians, there are arguments available to justify the pri-macy of the professional commitment or, on the other hand,to recognize exceptions to that primacy. For the chaplain,however, who or what adjudicates between commitments totwo professional codes? How should a chaplain—who upon

entering a tradition-specific clerical profession promised towitness faithfully and overtly to the existence of God, under-stood in specific, tradition-determined ways—balance thatprofessional obligation with what appear to be generally ac-cepted obligations of interfaith chaplaincy not to so witness toone’s patients?3

I have no doubt that most, if not all, chaplains and hospi-tal teaching programs have managed to resolve this potentialconflict. If they have not, they are not likely to be serving aschaplains or surviving as programs. My point is not that theconflicts are unresolvable, but that this matter of dual profes-sional allegiances must be explicitly considered when drawingup a professional ethic for hospital chaplains, in terms of whatis being asked of those who profess chaplaincy in relation totheir other professional commitments, and in terms of whatconstitutes an authentic description of chaplaincy ethics.

This fundamental question about the various moral re-sponsibilities of chaplains raises a related question—to whomare chaplains responsible?—and leads us to consider a secondway of conceptualizing the ethics of hospital chaplaincy.

Chaplaincy Ethics as an Ethic of Accountability

Whatever the relation of chaplaincy ethics to medicalethics (or, for that matter, to business ethics, which

seems to have more to do with medicine than ever before),there is a real need for a shared ethical language within thehealth care enterprise. The best candidate for a commonidiom is likely to be some version of the language of responsi-bility, of accountability. An ethic of accountability for a pro-fession entails that the profession should be able to give an ac-count of:

1) what its professionals do—which requires criteria that de-fine the field and distinguish it from others;

2) whether they do it well, and how—which requires modesof evaluation, requiring explicit descriptions of what countsas “doing it well” that can serve as the profession’s standardsof quality; and

3) whether they could do it better, and how—which re-quires mechanisms for enforcement of standards and im-provement of quality.

Thus, for the nascent profession of hospital chaplaincy, themoral requirement of accountability encompasses both anobligation to set standards of practice (and then to monitorand enforce them) and an obligation to participate in effortsdirected at quality improvement.

The focus on accountability does not remove but may helpus maneuver the chaplain’s conflicting fidelity commitments.It seems clear that, for chaplaincy as well as for medicine, ac-countability is most particularly owed to patients. Even if pa-tients are not the ones to whom chaplains must give their ac-count, they are nevertheless the ones to whom and for whomchaplains are responsible, and the ones whose vulnerability

H A S T I N G S C E N T E R R E P O R T 7November-December 2008

demands high standards of professional activity and constantefforts toward higher quality work.

This matter of setting standards, monitoring and enforcingthem, and working to improve the quality of chaplain inter-ventions generates consternation and resistance in some chap-lains, who understandably find it difficult to imagine ways ofcategorizing and judging their work that do not outrageouslydistort it. It is one thing to measure the prompt delivery of ac-curate doses of appropriate medications, quite another togauge the quality or the effect of a chaplain’s discussion ofspiritual matters at the bedside—and the unmodified imposi-tion of methods used for assessing the former may well not dojustice to the latter.

On the other hand, programsfor clinical pastoral education(CPE) have long consideredthemselves able to make judg-ments about their trainees onthe basis of such nonquantifi-able characteristics as their “pres-ence” with patients, responsive-ness to the needs and views ofpatients and colleagues, willing-ness to change and grow withintheir work, ability to refrainfrom preaching to patients orstaff, and some degree of adher-ence to the interfaith commit-ments of chaplaincy. There areprocesses already in place forprofessional board certificationof hospital chaplains and super-visors of chaplaincy training,and for accreditation of CPEprograms. In other words, stan-dards of practice for hospital chaplains clearly exist, even ifthey need some modification. These standards can be evaluat-ed, codified, and adopted, and they can then form the basisfor trajectories of quality improvement.

That said, an ethic of accountability would press the pro-fession of chaplaincy to ask itself, What else? Beyond thesetraits that make for a good chaplain at the bedside—opennessand responsiveness, perhaps also gentleness, calm, and anaversion to preaching—what else may be the responsibility ofchaplains in a health care setting? There is certainly the issue,revealed by Cobb’s injunction to pastors, of some yet-to-be-delineated obligation to provide care with substantive con-tent. But aside from these aspects of direct bedside interac-tion, what are the moral implications for the profession of thefact that chaplains’ work happens in a hospital, or hospice, orother setting in which medical care is being delivered?

Chaplain and theological educator Martha Jacobs has saidthat chaplains, rather than espousing theology, should be ask-ing the kinds of questions that theology raises. Her cogentclaim brings to mind Paul Tillich’s expansive definition of atheologian as not necessarily a theist, a believer, but as some-

one whose primary focus is on matters of ultimate concern.The kinds of questions theology raises are about matters of ul-timate concern, and I would argue that medicine needs oftento be reminded that such matters are always present in thework of health care, whether recognized or not, whethercouched in transcendent language or not. Chaplains bear re-sponsibility not for answering or solving them, but for keep-ing them visible, recognized, no longer ignored.

Sociologist Daniel Chambliss has identified the hospital asa site of thorough-going routinization, one important conse-quence of which is that moral issues often go unnoticed. Hewrites, “The great ethical danger, I think, is not that when

faced with an important deci-sion one makes the wrongchoice, but rather that onenever realizes that one is facing adecision at all.”4

The same may be said of rec-ognizing and responding tospiritual issues in the health caresetting. Such issues pervade seri-ous illness, childbirth, disability,dying, and the difficult deci-sions that so often attend them,and they are indeed matters ofultimate concern for most peo-ple, regardless of their religiousaffiliation or belief. In the midstof the routines of the setting,health care professionals andeven patients may fail to recog-nize that questions of lastingspiritual significance are at stakein daily, recurring, predictableevents that typify the hospital.

Chaplains are the professionals obligated to respond to thesequestions when they arise, but they are also responsible forseeing that the issues are noticed in the first place and thentaken seriously. The fact that the work of health care is shotthrough with spiritual significance, for recipients andproviders alike, needs to be held up to the light daily, spokenof openly, acknowledged, wrestled with, celebrated, andmourned—and this is surely the responsibility of the chap-lains, the “spiritual professionals” in the hospital.

Philosopher Margaret Urban Walker asserts that ethicistsin the health care setting should be regarded less as expert en-gineers, offering technical problem-solving approaches tomoral dilemmas, than as skilled architects, creating “moralspace” within which those who work with the sick and thedying can freely air both their certainties and their bafflement,and discern together ways of proceeding morally in the face ofirreducible ambiguities and conflicting commitments.5 Thedevelopment of such spaces—locations and opportunitieswithin the hospital for interprofessional conversations aboutwhat matters morally—can potentially convert the entire en-terprise into one truly moral space in which the inevitable

Chaplains should be candid about what they dothat can be done as well by

someone else, what they generally do better than others, and what can bedone well only by them.

8 H A S T I N G S C E N T E R R E P O R T November-December 2008

ethical dilemmas of medicine are consistently acknowledgedand are dealt with inclusively, early, and well.

Taking Walker’s lead, I suggest that chaplains see them-selves as professionals responsible for creating “sacred space”within the hospital, space in which it can be openly acknowl-edged that holy things are happening, things that are “setapart”—the fundamental meaning of “holy”—things thatmatter spiritually to everyone involved. A hospital chapel isonly the most obvious example of sacred space (although theeffect of its existence on the institution’s self-understandingshould not be underestimated or, for that matter, overvalued).Patients’ bedrooms and family waiting rooms surely also qual-ify, but we need to be reminded of that. And we look to chap-lains to denominate even more spaces as sacred—operatingrooms, nurses’ stations, clinics—by taking them seriously asplaces where important spiritual transactions are occurringand by calling the rest of us to do likewise. The ultimate goalwould be recognition, by the institution as a whole, that theentire health care enterprise—now including board rooms,kitchens, record rooms, and communication centers as well—is sacred space, full of infinite meaning.

A commitment to reclaim the sacredness of the placewhere human suffering, frailty, and hope come for help, andwhere help of various kinds and efficacy is provided, may en-tail a further commitment for chaplains to be courageous par-ticipants in and critics of their hospital’s organizational struc-tures and ethics—to be an effective voice at the table wherethe decisions about space, money, and their uses are beingmade. Might this also be a standard for chaplaincy practice, ameasure of quality that can be improved?

Whatever the answer to that question, the idea of sacredspace puts the accountability of the chaplain squarely withinthe “pastoral” aspect of the profession that distinguishes itfrom other professions engaged in the care of the sick anddying. Therefore, it is time to turn to a model for ethics thatmay seem to be most surely suited to the work of chaplains asthe ministers they are.

Chaplaincy Ethics as an Ethic of Ministry

To minister is to serve; an ethic of ministry is, therefore, anethic of service. Although “ministry,” like “pastoral,” is a

term that bears the weight of one particular religious tradi-tion, it is nevertheless a word that chaplains of all faiths canclaim as an appropriate tag for the patient-centered servicesthey offer. In what follows, “ministry” could be replaced with“service” and “minister” with “servant,” but the latter termbrings its own baggage—some of which plays into problemswith ministry/service discussed below. Like the other ap-proaches explored in this essay, an ethic of ministry keeps theneeds of the patient—the one being served—at the forefront.And, like an ethic of accountability, it also diminishes, with-out eliminating, the strength of moral obligations that do notdirectly involve the patient’s welfare.

A ministerial ethic may seem the most “natural” candidatefor a professional ethic for chaplaincy, but there are problems

with it that require the corrective lenses of other ethical ap-proaches, especially that of justice. I have already alluded tothe difficulty entailed by the profession’s interfaith designationas it limits chaplaincy’s ability to call on the ethical under-standings of specific religious traditions—which are, however,likely to be the source for individual chaplains’ senses of theirethics of ministry. In addition, perhaps the most importantthing to be said about any ethic of ministry is that it is poten-tially dangerous, both to the servant and the served.

There are apt lessons in this regard to be found within thedecades-long debate over the feminist “ethic of care.” The cor-rectives offered by more recent entries in that discussion high-light two salient dangers for ethical frameworks centered oncaring, and both dangers seem equally applicable to an ethiccentered on ministry. The first concern has to do with thepower of the servant over the served, a sort of “imperialism ofempathy” in which the actual needs and desires of the onecared for may be ignored or overwhelmed by the caregiver’sinterpretation of what service is called for. For example, thedepth and seriousness of a patient’s questions about personalresponsibility in relation to illness may be swept aside by achaplain’s certainty that self-blame is spiritually toxic; a pa-tient’s desire to prepare spiritually for death may be overriddenby a chaplain whose focus is on healing and hope for an earth-ly future. In those who choose to care for others, the rescueimpulse is often quite strong and can distract attention fromwhat is actually going on in an encounter. In the context ofmedical care, where the vulnerability of patients and the dom-inance of caregivers is already manifest and largely in-escapable, a responsible ethic of ministry will include safe-guards—or, at least, warnings—against a well-intentioned butpowerful and potentially heedless urge to help.

The second concern arising from consideration of an ethicof care can be construed as the reverse of the first. Withoutclear boundaries in place, it is possible for the needs of the onecared for to take precedence over any needs of the caregiver—for the served to so dominate the servant that ministry be-comes a form of bondage. Persons, including chaplains, whoare involved in the direct care of the sick are vulnerable, for ex-ample, to the patient who claims to derive comfort from theministrations of only one particular caregiver, engendering inthat clinician a feeling of obligation that may keep him or herin the hospital well beyond reasonable work hours. As men-tioned previously, the work of health care is characterized byconflicts among fidelity commitments for all its various pro-fessionals. Physicians, nurses, and chaplains alike are pulled si-multaneously by their obligations to patients, to the hospital,to their trainees, to their colleagues, and to the creation of newknowledge. They also experience conflicts between these mul-tiple work-related duties and the duties of their nonprofes-sional lives—their commitments to self, family, and friends. Aresponsible ethic of ministry will include explicit attention tothe chaplain’s welfare and the limits of the work’s demands.6

This matter of setting limits also raises the issue of profes-sional boundaries, already mentioned in terms of the profes-sion’s need to distinguish the care it gives from the sort of spir-

H A S T I N G S C E N T E R R E P O R T 9November-December 2008

itual care offered by other health care providers. To clarify andpromote recognition of such boundaries, chaplains should becandid about what they do that can be done by someone elseas well as it is done by chaplains, what they do that is general-ly done better by chaplains, and what they do that can bedone well only by chaplains. Further, chaplains must considerwhat should not be done by chaplains. For example, it is notunusual for an experienced chaplain, well versed in the lan-guage and practices of the hospital, to act as the interpreter ofunintelligible or minimalist medical explanations to patientsand families. Is this an appropriate role? Are chaplains trainedto carry out this task—and should they be? Should it be astandard of practice?

There are other questions, of similar practical relevance,that should be asked: Should chaplains serve as cultural bro-kers? As mediators and conflict resolution facilitators? Theprocess of defining chaplaincy as a profession calls for settinglimits, even if broad, on what counts as appropriate profes-sional work for chaplains. Setting these limits must precedethe establishment of standards for the performance of thatwork, and it can only then be followed by consideration ofquality improvement.

There are obviously more questions than answers in thisdiscussion, questions that are rightly answered only by thechaplains forming this profession. However, it does seem thatany professional ethic for chaplaincy must contain a thought-ful consideration and explanation of the particular ethicalobligations entailed by the health care context of chaplaincy,not only because of the central status and vulnerability of pa-tients, but also because of the intensity of commitment andthe confusion that characterize the work of health careproviders. It must include careful attention to the demands,dangers, and limitations inherent in a moral practice of min-istry, justifying the practice and safeguarding both the practi-tioners and their patients. And it must delineate and justifythe responsibilities of chaplains, transforming their multiplelines of accountability into an ethical framework for chaplain-cy as responsible health care ministry.

1. M.N. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hel-lenistic Ethics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994).

2. J.B. Cobb, Jr., “The Problem of Evil and the Task of Ministry,” inEncountering Evil: Live Options in Theodicy, second ed., ed. S.T. Davis(Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 181.

3. There are now interfaith seminaries in the United States, some ofwhose students enroll in order to become hospital chaplains. It remainsto be seen whether the educational content of their professional voca-tional preparation is sufficiently robust to constitute its own tradition,especially if “interfaith” includes both theist and nontheist faiths, and toengender allegiances that produce the sorts of conflicts I refer to here.That is, the hypothetical conflict of a deeply theist chaplain asked toavoid talk of God with a nonreligious patient could be mirrored in thatof a thoroughly “interfaith” chaplain confronted by a deeply traditional-ly religious patient who desires specific practices and references to a veryparticular God.

4. D.F. Chambliss, Beyond Caring: Hospitals, Nurses, and the SocialOrganization of Ethics (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1996),59.

5. M.U. Walker, “Keeping Moral Space Open: New Images of EthicsConsulting,” Hastings Center Report 23, no. 2 (1993): 33-40.

6. In many medical centers, chaplain trainees are categorized as med-ical house staff, subject to the same limitations on work hours that applyto interns and residents. In some medical departments, the constraintson house staff time have led to significantly increased demands on thetime of junior faculty, a development that the profession of chaplaincyshould certainly try to avoid as it works to protect the well-being and thetime of both its members and its aspirants.

Chaplains often describe their work in health care as“translation” between the world of the patient and theworld of hospital medicine. Translators usually work

with texts, interpreters with words. However, when chaplainsuse this metaphor, it describes something other than a discretetask associated with the meaning of words. While medicalprofessionals focus on patients’ medical conditions, chaplainsseek to read the whole person, asking questions about whatpeople’s lives are like outside of the hospital, what they careabout most, and where they find joy and support in theworld. Chaplains offer a supportive presence that serves to re-mind patients and caregivers that people are more than justtheir medical conditions or their current collection of con-cerns. Some chaplains are skilled at translating patients’ expe-riences and sources of meaning in real time, allowing medicalteams to better understand the person they are treating.“Translation” is also defined as metamorphosis. Chaplains

B Y R A Y M O N D D E V R I E S , N A N C YB E R L I N G E R , A N D W E N D Y C A D G E

Lost in Translation: The Chaplain’s Role in Health Care

Raymond de Vries, Nancy Berlinger, and Wendy Cadge, “Lost in Translation:The Chaplain’s Role in Health Care,” Hastings Center Report 38, no. 6 (2008):23-27.

10 H A S T I N G S C E N T E R R E P O R T November-December 2008

provide this sort of translation when they are alone with pa-tients, listening to their deepest concerns, helping them rede-fine their lives.

Unlike a professional interpreter, who helps patients andclinicians communicate when they do not share a commonlanguage, the chaplain is not just a conveyor of the spokenwords of others. A patient, family member, nurse, or physicianmay seek out the chaplain for help in translating a situation: Isthe family in denial? Is the team giving up? Is the patient readyto go home, like her husband says, or ready to rest, like shesays?

Ironically, chaplains—skilled at mediating between pa-tients and hospital staff—often have no one they can rely onto advocate for them at budget time, no one who can “trans-late” the tangible benefits chaplains provide to patients, fami-lies, and staff into terms hospital administrators can under-stand.

The Professional Chaplaincy and Health Care Quality Im-provement research project was initiated, in part, in responseto this dilemma: If chaplains wish to be recognized as a healthcare profession, they need to be able to describe, to themselvesand to others, what constitutes “quality” in their area of pa-tient care. Like other health care professionals, they need tospecify how their profession and their day-to-day work in thehospital contribute to the ongoing task of quality improve-ment in health care. This is no easy task. The work that chap-lains do is difficult to measure in conventional QI terms: theprecise duties of their job are unspecified, and chaplains oftenfind themselves improvising to meet the needs of patients andcaregivers. In this situation, how can chaplains define theirrole in improving health care? External perceptions of chap-lains and chaplaincy also complicate this translational task: ischaplaincy best understood as a specialized form of religiousministry, in—but not of—the health care setting? Or is ittruly a health care profession, and if so, what is the nature ofthe health care service that chaplains provide, and how is it rel-evant to patients’ health care needs and their treatment? Is it,in some way, both of these? Without attention to these broad-er sociological questions, it is difficult for chaplains to seethemselves as a “professionalizing profession,” and to make thespecial nature of their work understood to the administratorswho must make decisions about investing in services that haveno reimbursement code.

Raymond de Vries and Wendy Cadge, two of the authorsof this essay, were invited by project codirector NancyBerlinger, the third author, to participate in this project as so-ciologists who would observe, reflect, and offer a series ofthinking points about the profession and future of hospitalchaplaincy. De Vries comes to the project as a sociologist ofbioethics (another occupation struggling with its identity andplace in worlds of medicine and science) and with expertise inthe sociology of culture and the professions. Cadge is a sociol-ogist of religion who studies, among other things, the formaland informal presence of religion and spirituality in hospitals.The three of us offer our thinking in the spirit of continued

conversation and with deep respect for the work of health carechaplains.

The Road to Professionalization

Seen from the point of view of the social sciences, the desireof chaplains to strengthen their profession—to more clear-

ly define their work and to establish agreed-upon standards ofpractice for those eligible to be called “chaplain”—is a pre-dictable stage in the natural history of an occupational group.Changes in society and technology bring with them changesin the division of labor. Not only does the nature of and needfor work change (think of the new occupations created by thecomputer revolution); so, too, does the way the work of soci-ety is divided among occupational groups.

Sociologists have long observed the comings and goings ofoccupational groups, and they pay particularly close attentionto the strategies and social conditions associated with the suc-cessful and unsuccessful efforts of these groups to secure aplace in the division of labor.1 As chaplains consider the workthey must do to establish their profession, insights derivedfrom the sociology of occupations are useful. The followingmetaphor, drawn from the sociology of work and occupations,offers a helpful perspective on chaplains’ place among otheroccupational groups:

Think of all the work that has to get done in a society as thelandform upon which a city is based. The division of labor isthe street grid that defines this landform: some areas arezoned for manufacturing, others for services, some for re-spectable tasks, others for deviant ones; some areas are iden-tified for the market, others for domestic labor. Each zone . . . is a site for potential ecological struggle. Some are se-curely occupied by well-entrenched occupations. Others arescrapped over: some want to annex new areas to territorythey already control; some wish to abandon a declining areain order to colonize a more desirable one; others desire totake over a neglected patch and displace or organize the ex-isting occupants to improve it.2

Similarly, as chaplains seek to “stake a claim” in the terrain ofhealth care they are, in some cases, seeking to “annex” areasthat others control, and in other cases they are moving intoterritory abandoned by other professions.

Also relevant to the situation of chaplains are the ideasabout labor markets developed by Eliot Freidson, the preemi-nent twentieth century sociologist of the professions. Accord-ing to Freidson, human labor may be divided into four“economies of work” based on the nature of labor markets.Best known, of course, is the official labor market, where workis legally and economically recognized, included in measuresof production, and categorized in the census lists of job titles.But alongside the official market for work exist three othermarkets: the criminal labor market, the informal labor market,and the subjective labor market. It is this last market—the sub-jective—that is most pertinent to chaplaincy. Freidson definedthis arena as the market where goods and services are traded

H A S T I N G S C E N T E R R E P O R T 11November-December 2008

without direct economic exchange, and he saw it as both thecradle and the grave of many occupations. Chaplaincy can beunderstood as work that moved, or perhaps is moving, fromthe “subjective” to the “official” labor force: having begun as“volunteer” work by clergy whose “real” job was ministeringto a congregation, it is now an occupation paid to be a pas-toral presence in health care settings.

As chaplains seek to map out their territory in the world ofwork—to move their occupation from the subjective labormarket to the official labor market—they must overcome cer-tain challenges generated by their history and the nature oftheir work.

No clear jurisdiction. First,hospital chaplains do manythings. This “jack-of-all-trades”approach serves the needs of anew occupation well—in seek-ing to establish a foothold, occu-pational groups are wise to servethe needs of established profes-sionals and ingratiate themselveswith occupations that have morepolitical power. But what worksto get one’s foot in the occupa-tional door harms efforts to pro-fessionalize. In some ways, beinga chaplain is a “vacuum identi-ty”—the work of chaplains canbe seen as filling the many vacu-ums that arise among the jobs ofother professions in medical set-tings. Chaplains fill a void ratherthan offering a well-defined ser-vice. In order to secure a place asa profession, an occupational group must have a clear bound-ary around its work. It is difficult to stake a jurisdictionalclaim with an ambiguous definition of one’s jurisdiction.

Disagreement within the occupational group. Not surpris-ingly given the many tasks and varied educational back-grounds of chaplains, disagreement exists within the groupabout the proper definition of a chaplain. The leaders of themain professional groups of chaplains have established cre-dentialing standards to answer two basic questions: Whatmust a professional chaplain know, and what kind of trainingis required to gain that knowledge? On the other hand, thesesame leaders have not yet reached agreement on standards orscope of practice: What should all chaplains do, or refrainfrom doing, in recognition of a duty of care? What are theboundaries in which they do these things? Disagreementsabout the answers to these questions slow the move towardfull professional status. Those who prefer the status quo andthose who feel threatened by the move toward professionalstatus can undermine efforts by the occupational group toprofessionalize.

Self-defining. Because chaplaincy is not yet broadly recog-nized as a distinct profession, others may feel entitled to use or

be granted the title “chaplain” when they are doing certainthings. For example, clergy who do not work as health carechaplains may claim the title “chaplain” when they are visitinghospitalized members of their congregation. Volunteers inchaplaincy departments are frequently called “chaplain” bypatients and family members. These realities work against ef-forts to distinguish the work of professional chaplains, andthey make it difficult for other professional groups, and thepublic, to see chaplaincy as a distinct health care profession. Apatient in a U.S. hospital is unlikely to encounter a “volun-teer” physician—the category of “physician” is understood tobe a professional category. However, understaffed pastoral

care departments rely on volun-teers to meet specific, often reli-gious, needs of particular pa-tient groups. An internistwould be professionally remissif she called herself a “surgeon”solely on the grounds that bothinternists and surgeons havemedical degrees. However, acommunity clergyperson mightdefend his right to be called“chaplain” even though theonly thing he or she shares witha health care chaplain is thesame postgraduate degree.Defining what professionalchaplains do, what volunteersdo, and what community clergydo with respect to “chaplaincy,”and determining which of theseactivities are health care servicesand which are religious services,

are further challenges for this profession.Challenging others’ turf. In staking their claim for a piece

of property in the world of medical work, chaplains trespasson the work of others. Some occupational groups will notmind giving up a bit of their property (see “dirty work”below), but others will be more reluctant. Two groups thatmay resist incursions in their work are social workers and localclergy. Many of the tasks that chaplains do can be seen as tasksthat social workers do—for example, making arrangementsfor family members or helping to solve disputes between med-ical staff and patients and families. It is likely that some med-ical social workers will not look kindly on those who threatentheir livelihood. Also, local clergy may see professional, hospi-tal-based chaplains as encroaching on the important workthey do with members of their congregations.

Taking over “dirty work.” Sociologist C. Everett Hugheswas the first to examine how dirty work is passed among andwithin occupational groups, typically flowing down the lad-der of prestige. Chaplains may not regard the work they do asbeing “dirty,” but in the eyes of more established profes-sions—such as physicians—talking with patients about spiri-tual concerns or ensuring that their pastoral care needs are

If chaplains wish to be recognized as a profession,

they must be able to describewhat constitutes “quality” in

their area of patient care.But chaplaincy work is

difficult to measure.

met are distractions from the “real” work of medicine and canbe a source of discomfort for members of these professions. Asa presence that relieves physicians from this unpleasant work,chaplains can use this aspect of their job description to ad-vance their efforts to professionalize.

The “theology problem.” Chaplains are products of recog-nized faith traditions: they graduate from seminaries, divinityschools, or rabbinical schools; most are ordained; and they arerequired to document their relationship to a recognized faithtradition as one of the requirements for chaplaincy certifica-tion. However, once certified, many are called on to be “mul-tifaith” and to be available to patients who reply “none” whenasked if they have a religious preference. Deploying chaplainsoutside of the religious tradi-tions in which they were trainedfurther confuses their profes-sional identity: most other pro-fessions do not work this way.(One that does is clinicalbioethics, an interdisciplinaryfield in which many practition-ers were trained in a specific aca-demic or professional discipline,rather than in “bioethics.” How-ever, this may change as moreuniversities offer bioethics de-grees that can function as a pro-fessional credential.)

This problem is compound-ed by the fact that some chap-lains work in faith-based institu-tions that have their own reli-gious ethos. In these situations, chaplains may be responsiblefor adhering to religious guidelines in delivering health careservices, but they may also be called to serve a multifaith pa-tient population. How chaplains in these settings negotiatethe institutional religious ethos is an open question.

No agreement on best practices. As part of the health carework force, chaplains are being asked to join the quality im-provement movement. But unlike medical work where inter-ventions can be tested in rigorously controlled clinical trials,chaplaincy work is difficult to measure. Quantity is frequent-ly substituted for quality: chaplains may be encouraged to“make the numbers” by focusing on the number of patientsvisited each day, rather than on the quality of the encounterwith each patient and the outcomes for that patient’s care.The lack of evidence for the medical efficacy of practices thatmay promote patient well-being presents another challenge tochaplaincy. (It is a challenge sometimes shared with palliativecare and integrative medicine: these services differ from chap-laincy in that they are not perceived as “religious,” however,and they are done by members of recognized medical profes-sions.) In this climate, chaplains are inclined to argue amongthemselves over best practices, once again dividing the occu-pational group and slowing efforts to professionalize. If mem-bers of the occupation cannot agree on how to define and

measure their own work, then why should society grant themprofessional status?

Many credentials, no license to practice. Chaplains who areordained clergy are already members of a professional catego-ry. (Some chaplains come from faith traditions that do not or-dain clergy or do not ordain women.) However, ordination,board certification, or specialized certifications available tochaplains are not the equivalent of a state license to practicemedicine, nursing, clinical social work, or clinical psychology.This is one important mark of a “profession”—state recogni-tion of an occupation as a profession by using licensure to“close the market”—to prevent competition from those notproperly certified. Sociologists disagree about the politics of li-

censure. Some believe that statelicensure is given in response tothe demands of a well-orga-nized occupational group, whileothers believe that states grantlicensure only when “closing themarket” is in the interest of thestate. Chaplains do not have tosettle this debate, but regardlessof which theory is correct, theydo have work to do if they areto gain the advantages of licen-sure.

Soft skills. The work of med-icine is often divided into cur-ing and caring, with the “hard”skills of curing or controllingdisease accorded much more re-spect than the “soft” skills of

caring or “healing.” The “harder” the skill, the more the pres-tige: thus the status of surgeons is much higher than that offamily doctors or palliative care specialists. Chaplains areclearly on the caring, soft side of medicine, and while this willnot prevent them from claiming professional turf, it will bethe turf of the ancillary medical occupations.

Salaried, yet responsible to patients and families. Likenurses, chaplains who are paid by health care organizationsare in a difficult position. Their paycheck makes them an-swerable to their employer, but their duty is to meet the needsof patients, families, and staff. Often, these obligations coin-cide—good care for patients and staff members benefits thehospital—but there are cases where chaplains (and nurses) areasked to bite the hand that feeds them by calling attention tocare that is not as good as it could be and to unreasonable or-ganizational demands on staff. This situation presents chal-lenges to the autonomy of the occupation that more estab-lished professions do not face. Also, while nurses are a largeprofession that is often unionized and whose services are indemand, chaplains are a small profession that lacks the collec-tive power to protect their autonomy at the negotiating table.

12 H A S T I N G S C E N T E R R E P O R T November-December 2008

Chaplains should thinkabout how to translate themeaning and value of their

work into terms that hospitaladministrators can

understand.

H A S T I N G S C E N T E R R E P O R T 13November-December 2008

Self-Interest and Public Interest

In their journey toward professional status, chaplains mustfind a way to balance professional self-interest and the in-

terest of the people they serve. The official party line of mostprofessions is that all their organizational efforts are undertak-en on behalf of their clients, but decades of sociological analy-sis show this claim to be hollow. The best-known examples ofprofessional self-interest come from the field of medicine,where we have seen doctors in the United States consistentlyresisting changes that would improve access to health care.The American Medical Association famously fought the legis-lation that created Medicare (health care for the elderly anddisabled) in the 1960s, arguing—with a strong dose of self-in-terest—that the plan would reduce the quality of care for all.More recently, “white coat” rallies calling for malpractice re-form have at times cast physicians as the victims of greedy, liti-gious patients.

The “bedside” orientation of chaplains may make themless likely to put professional interests ahead of the interests ofpatients and families. However, some chaplains tell us thatthey avoid these uncomfortable conflicts by “flying under theradar.” This metaphor suggests that chaplains may view theiremploying institutions or their professions as antagonistic totheir interests: a pilot flies under the radar to avoid gettingshot down by the enemy, not merely to avoid being noticed.

Our review of the strategic plan of the Association of Pro-fessional Chaplains shows how easy it is to conflate profes-sional and patient interests. Here are the seven goals of theAPC described in their 2007–2008 strategic plan:

Goal A: Increase collaboration and interaction with otherappropriate chaplaincy, spiritual care, and human serviceorganizations.

Goal B: Increase awareness of the value of Board CertifiedChaplains.

Goal C: Increase members’ ownership of the APC.

Goal D: Increase the participation by those of diverse back-grounds in activities of the APC at all levels.

Goal E: Identify and develop resources sufficient to fundand accomplish APC programs.

Goal F: Nurture the spiritual life of APC members.3

The first five of these goals are about building the credential-ing organization itself. With the possible exception of the finalitem, none of these goals seeks to improve the capacity ofchaplains to meet the spiritual, emotional, and physical needsof patients, families, or health care workers. Also absent fromthese explicit goals is a commitment to conduct or contributeto research that could provide empirical evidence of the valueof chaplains to patients. Doubtless the drafters of these goals

sincerely believe that strengthening the credentialing organiza-tion will improve service to clients. However, the sociology oforganizations teaches us that means often become ends.

How can chaplaincy avoid the extremes of “flying belowthe radar” (which works against unifying the profession) andthe self-interested move of reducing the goals of health care tothe goals of health care organizations? How can the professioncorrect these errors of translation—self-understandings thatseem to offer security but in fact may create barriers to profes-sional maturation by perpetuating a vision of a profession asinsular or marginal?

Here are our recommendations. Chaplains and their orga-nizations should think about how to translate the meaningand value of their work into terms that hospital administratorsand others in decision-making positions can understand. Inhealth care, translations must be clear and accurate if they areto provide an adequate basis for understanding and policy.Chaplains should make a practice of translating from the ter-minology of health care systems into that of their own profes-sion. By paying close attention to the nature of institutionaldecisions about patient care, how various patient care profes-sions are deployed, and the concerns of decision-makers ingeneral, chaplains will be able to identify research questionsthat can yield reliable information about the chaplain’s contri-bution to patient care. These activities should not be confusedwith “making the numbers” or merely reacting to institution-al concerns.

We also encourage chaplains and their organizations tolook for examples of individual chaplains or chaplaincy de-partments that are proficient translators and to analyze whatmakes them good at explaining the value of what they do toothers.

Finally, because chaplains seek to work in the complex cul-ture of health care delivery, and because claiming a profes-sional role in this culture means acknowledging one’s organi-zational responsibilities, we encourage chaplains who aspire tolead chaplaincy departments to receive some training in healthcare organization and management. We also encourage orga-nizations that offer continuing education to chaplains to rec-ognize this need and provide credit for this training.

Acknowledgments

Raymond de Vries’ work on this project was supported by agrant from the National Library of Medicine (NIH,1G13LM008781).

1. This discussion of the sociology of occupations is borrowed froman analysis of the professionalization of bioethics found in R. de Vries,R. Dingwall, and K. Orfali, “The Moral Organization of the Profes-sions: Bioethics in the United States and France,” forthcoming in Cur-rent Sociology 57, no. 4 (July 2009).

2. Ibid.3. Association of Professional Chaplains, “2007–2008 Strategic Plan,”

http://www.professionalchaplains.org/uploadedFiles/pdf/Strategic%20Plan%202007-2008%20-%20no%20imp%20points-portrait.pdf.

14 H A S T I N G S C E N T E R R E P O R T November-December 2008

The ethical imperative for quality improvement inhealth care requires that all health care personnel en-gage in attentive observation, reflection, innovative

thinking, and action. A core QI question for everyone work-ing in a clinical setting is this: How can the delivery and ser-vice systems I participate in be improved to enhance and im-prove quality of care for patients and families? Chaplains,chaplaincy programs, clinical ethics consultants, and ethicscommittees all share this commitment. A challenge for bothchaplains and ethics consultants is to articulate their uniqueroles, purposes, goals, and objectives so that they can establishadequate educational and training standards and programs,measure what they are doing against what they should bedoing, and initiate, participate in, and maintain QI initiatives.

Both chaplains and ethics consultants generally claim tohave distinctive roles, activities, knowledge, skills, and compe-tencies. Nevertheless, similarities in their activities suggest thatadvantages may result from partnering as each group searchesfor its place in the health care system and for ways to best in-troduce QI interventions. Chaplains and clinical ethicists to-gether could identify, recommend, and promote methods use-ful to both groups in the clinical context.

Chaplains and ethics consultants engage in many similaractivities. For example, both meet with patients and their fam-

ilies one-on-one and during patient care conferences; bothserve on interdisciplinary teams and participate in multidisci-plinary clinical rounds; both document their interventions inpatients’ medical records; both provide services to and rou-tinely interact with clinical staff and other employees; bothparticipate as members of ethics committees and may leadethics committees; and both participate as members of otherorganizational groups, such as institutional review boards andconflict of interest committees. In some hospitals and otherhealth care settings, a chaplain may be the ethics consultant(where the individual consultant model is used) or may be in-cluded routinely as a member of ethics consultation teams.Both chaplains and clinical ethicists can serve as patient advo-cates, assist with advance care planning, facilitate communica-tion and reduce conflicts among various stakeholders, andrefer patients, families, and staff to other organizational re-sources after identifying their needs.

As a result, both chaplains and clinical ethicists need simi-lar skill sets, knowledge areas, and character traits. Theyshould be attentive listeners who are able to communicate in-terest, respect, support, and empathy. They must be adept atrecognizing verbal and nonverbal cues, especially during diffi-cult conversations, and they must be able to assertively articu-late their own assessments, insights, and recommendations.Both groups must understand not only the health care sys-tems and clinical contexts in which they work (including rel-evant institutional policies, procedures, and practices), butalso any special beliefs and perspectives of patients, families,and staff. Character traits both groups share include compas-sion, integrity, humility, honesty, courage, and self-knowl-edge. Further, the activities and services of both chaplains andclinical ethicists usually do not generate income, and so bothgroups must demonstrate their “value-added” impact in waysother than by just adding up billable hours.

Neither chaplains nor clinical ethicists can claim a monop-oly on expertise in their principle areas of service and focus—spirituality and ethical decision-making, respectively. Othermembers of the health care team and staff may have signifi-cant expertise in these areas as well. Further, in addition tocertified chaplains, some health care organizations use chap-lain volunteers, some with less—but some with more—knowledge, skills, and experience than their certified col-leagues. Similarly, in addition to (or instead of) paid clinicalethicists, many organizations have volunteer ethics committeeconsultants, some with less—but some with more—knowl-edge, skills, and experience than their paid counterparts.

Both chaplains and clinical ethicists, then, struggle with acommon set of questions: What are our unique roles and con-tributions? What are the core elements of our work that onlywe can bring to the health care encounter? What charactertraits enable someone to become a contributing practitionerof a “professionalizing profession”? What measures of effec-tiveness should we use to evaluate our work and inform qual-ity improvement? Should clinical ethics permit multiple certi-fying bodies (as currently exist for chaplains) or one central-ized certifying organization? Should clinical ethics follow

B Y M A R T I N L . S M I T H

Chaplaincy and Clinical Ethics: A Common Set of Questions

Martin L. Smith, “Chaplaincy and Clinical Ethics: A Common Set of Ques-tions,” Hastings Center Report 38, no. 6 (2008): 28-29.

H A S T I N G S C E N T E R R E P O R T 15November-December 2008

chaplaincy in establishing standards for training programs andcompetencies for trainees?

At this stage in the evolution of chaplaincy and clinicalethics, each profession has some clear accomplishments andfoundational elements upon which to build, but there aremore for chaplaincy than for clinical ethics. Despite some di-versity among chaplaincy interest groups, chaplains, pastoralcounselors, pastoral educators, and students regulate them-selves through a common professional code of ethics that of-fers basic values, standards of practice, and a mechanism foraccountability. Accreditation is available for clinical pastoraleducation (CPE) programs that adhere to requirements forthe admission of trainees and toexplicit standards related toCPE’s specialized teaching,training, and supervision. Pro-grams for training future CPEsupervisors also exist. The U.S.Department of Education andthe Centers for Medicare andMedicaid Services provide a“stamp of approval” for thesechaplaincy and supervisorytraining programs by reimburs-ing for the trainees’ supervisedhours of pastoral care. Successfulchaplain trainees completing therequired number of units andhours of CPE training can be“certified” (not licensed) aschaplains. The Spiritual CareCollaborative, representing thevarious chaplaincy certifyingbodies, has identified a commonset of competencies and exper-tise for certification. Certification affirms that core competen-cies have been achieved, and it provides credentialing for pro-viding pastoral care services in a clinical setting. Continuingeducation credits are required annually to maintain certifica-tions.

Clinical ethicists lag behind. A set of core competencieslimited to ethics consultation was developed by a national taskforce made up of twenty-one scholars from medicine, nursing,law, philosophy, religious studies, regulatory agencies, and theCollege of Chaplains (the precursor to the current Associationof Professional Chaplains). The core competencies were setforth as voluntary guidelines, and the task force membersunanimously concluded, when their report was published in1998, “that certification of individuals or groups to do ethicsconsultation is, at best, premature.”1 Although various acade-mic and training programs in bioethics and clinical ethicshave emerged and some grant academic degrees, no clinicallybased training or fellowship programs are accredited or pro-vide a basis for certification because no accrediting or certify-ing body exists. Based on the identified core competencies forethics consultation, the American Society for Bioethics and

Humanities will soon publish a recommended and voluntary“education guide” for improving proficiencies in the corecompetencies for ethics consultation. The ASBH’s leadershipand members have debated whether to develop a code ofethics for the organization, or at least for clinical ethicists, anda task force has studied the issue. To date, however, there is alack of consensus about moving forward with such a docu-ment. Finally, absent certification (or licensure), continuingeducation units are not required for clinical ethicists.

Despite their respective progress toward emerging identi-ties, gaps remain for both chaplains and clinical ethicists, es-pecially in the areas of evaluation and, correspondingly, quali-

ty improvement. In an evidence-based environment such ashealth care, a clear need existsfor concrete methods and mech-anisms to evaluate effectivenessand impact based on standardsof performance. But to date, theefforts of both chaplaincy andclinical ethics have been limited.Simply counting the number ofpastoral care visits or ethics con-sultations addresses quantity butnot quality. Patient and familysatisfaction scores can be deceiv-ing, and they do not take intoaccount the nuances and sub-tleties of chaplains’ and clinicalethicists’ proper roles. Indeed,chaplains’ and clinical ethicists’work may not always contributeto “satisfied clients.” Some whoare served by them—for in-stance, a patient who orders a

chaplain out of a hospital room because the chaplain is awoman, or a family member who strongly disagrees with anethics consultant’s recommendation to disclose medical prog-nosis to an adult patient with decision-making capacity—mayexpress high dissatisfaction with the respective services ren-dered. And even if a patient is satisfied, a hospital may be un-able to measure that satisfaction according to the same scale ituses to gauge success in more objective areas. For instance, thework both chaplains and clinical ethicists do advocating forpatients will not necessarily decrease a patient’s length of stayor help to more efficiently utilize hospital resources.

Although neither chaplaincy nor clinical ethics has beenable to fully identify or develop its role in modern health care,both make their own unique contributions to the care of pa-tients, families, and staff. The many commonalities of both“professionalizing professions” warrants their increased collab-oration to address the similar challenges that each faces.

1. American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, Core Competenciesfor Health Care Ethics Consultation (Glenview, Ill.: 1998), 31.

Chaplains and clinicalethicists together could identify, recommend, and promote quality

improvement methodsuseful to both groups in

the clinical context.

16 H A S T I N G S C E N T E R R E P O R T November-December 2008

Seasoned clinical ethicists have a saying: You cannot bitea wall. The saying refers to that demoralizing moment oftaking in the scale of a (really) big challenge in health

care. We have two options when we find ourselves up againstthis wall. One is to ignore it. This means ignoring the needsof people who are sick, or lack access to health care, or couldbe harmed by care that is not as good as it could be. A healthcare professional’s duty of care is a duty to act in the interestsof those for whom one cares. Merely feeling awful—it’s ashame about that wall—is the same as ignoring the wall, fromthe perspective of those who suffer because of the wall’s exis-tence.

The second is to be ethical. We can find a crack in the walland work away at it. The trick is to avoid the temptation tobite off just a bit and declare victory, rather than staying con-nected to others working on the whole wall. It would be apity to take down just enough of the wall to build a silo.

Quality improvement in health care can look like yet an-other unbitable wall. And yet, the Institute of Medicine gaveus six ways of looking at the QI wall in its influential 2001 re-port, Crossing the Quality Chasm. The report described sixgoals, or “aims,” for QI in health care: it should aim to make

health care safe, effective, patient-centered, timely, efficient,and equitable.1

Different health care professions have focused on one ormore of these now-classic six, with particular attention tosafety and effectiveness. Health care, as an enterprise, has afundamental obligation to distinguish safe from unsafe andeffective from ineffective. Certain health care professions andclinical specialties—pharmacists and anesthesiologists, amongothers—have acknowledged safety to be their distinctive QIgoal. They have described problems—medication labeling,equipment design—and have recommended solutions in-tended to increase safety and also effectiveness, given that un-safe care is ineffective care. They have pledged, as a matter ofprofessional ethics, to keep working away on this bit of theQI wall.

It is now time for health care chaplains to step up to thiswall. The goal of patient-centered care should be stronglyidentified with this profession. Patient-centered care is a wor-thy goal and one that chaplains can contribute to, significant-ly and measurably.

Why QI? Ethics and Tactics

But why should chaplains choose any QI goal? And whypatient-centered care in particular?

If chaplaincy wants to be taken seriously as a health careservice—if chaplains want to be taken seriously as health careprofessionals—then they cannot hold themselves apart fromthe ethical obligations of the health care enterprise. Doing sowould reduce the delivery of spiritual care to something thatone does for one’s own fulfillment and for the incidental oroccasional benefit of others.

It is the nature of chaplaincy to be in solidarity with thesuffering person, which in health care is usually the patient orthe patient’s caregiver. It is also the nature of most chaplainsto prefer to be “at the bedside.” If chaplaincy cannot identifywith patient-centered care as its distinctive QI goal, then it ishard to make the case that another profession ought to. Andit’s hard to imagine why chaplains would not want to work tomake care better for the patients in the other beds, mindfulthat they themselves cannot be at every bedside.

Also, it makes good tactical sense for the profession ofchaplaincy to commit itself to patient-centered care as its QIgoal. Thanks to the wide dissemination and discussion of theIOM report, no health care institution can easily argue for adefinition of QI that does not include these six. If chaplaincy,as an institutional service, went on record as saying, in effect,“We’ll help you with the goal of patient-centered care,” thenchaplaincy can claim to share the credit for institutionalprogress, even as it will be held more accountable for showingprogress. Good tactics can converge with good ethics.

Defining “QI.” If we accept that the price of admission toprofessional status includes involvement in QI, and if we ac-cept that chaplains, as a matter of ethics and tactics, may havea particular affinity for QI activities aimed at advancing pa-

B Y N A N C Y B E R L I N G E R

The Nature of Chaplaincy and theGoals of QI: Patient-Centered Care as Professional Responsibility

Nancy Berlinger, “The Nature of Chaplaincy and the Goals of QI: Patient-Cen-tered Care as Professional Responsibility,” Hastings Center Report 38, no. 6(2008): 30-33.

H A S T I N G S C E N T E R R E P O R T 17November-December 2008

tient-centered care, then how should chaplains go aboutdoing this?

First, they should become familiar with a good workingdefinition of QI. A recent Hastings Center project on the eth-ical issues raised by quality improvement defined “QI” as“systematic, data-guided activities designed to bring aboutimmediate, positive changes in the delivery of health care inparticular settings.”2 Conducting systematic, data-guided ac-tivities to advance patient-centered care is different from thedesire, however sincere, to provide patient-centered care—orthe belief, however sincere, that one is already doing so.3

Defining “patient-centered care.” Next, chaplains shouldbecome familiar with how themost influential organizationswithin the QI movement define“patient-centered care”:

• Institute for Healthcare Im-provement: “Care that is trulypatient-centered considers pa-tients’ cultural traditions, theirpersonal preferences and values,their family situations, and theirlifestyles. It makes the patientand their loved ones an integralpart of the care team who col-laborate with health care profes-sionals in making clinical deci-sions. [It] puts responsibility forimportant aspects of self-careand monitoring in patients’hands—along with the toolsand support they need to carryout that responsibility. [It] en-sures that transitions between providers, departments, andhealth care settings are respectful, coordinated, and effi-cient.”4

• Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality: “In a patient-centered model, patients become active participants in theirown care and receive services designed to focus on their indi-vidual needs and preferences, in addition to advice and coun-sel from health professionals.”5

• IOM: “providing care that is respectful of and responsiveto individual patient preferences, needs, and values and en-suring that patient values guide all clinical decisions.”6

• National Quality Forum: “care [that] is centered on whatpatients need and want, rather than on what is convenient forproviders.”7

These definitions are not identical, but they are quite sim-ilar. “Patient-centered care” encompasses both the individualpatient and the coordination of care in the interests of all pa-tients. In a four-hundred-bed hospital, there should not befour hundred customized models of patient-centered care,but rather one model that can reflect the needs and prefer-ences of each patient with respect to his or her diagnosis andtreatment goals, as well as how this patient uses health careand receives support from family and other caregivers.

If this institution uses “patient-centered care” only as amarketing slogan for the billboards—“Where you are the cen-ter of our care”—but does not show its staff a convincingmodel of patient-centered care nor give them permission andincentives to make continuous improvements to the workingmodel, then it will be discouraging for this staff to contem-plate what the Agency for Healthcare Research and Qualitycalls the “quality gap”: the observable difference “betweenhealth care processes or outcomes observed in practice, andthose potentially obtainable on the basis of current profes-sional knowledge.”8 This is also, as we say in bioethics, thegap between “is” and “ought.” And if any health care profes-

sional or profession uses “pa-tient-centered care” to describean attitude or aspiration, butnot an action—then nothinghas happened yet that will helpthese patients. Identifying withpatients is not the same as ac-tively looking for ways to bridgethe quality gap between theircurrent care and the better carethey could be receiving.

From “ought” to “is”—ad-vancing patient-centered carethrough the work of chaplains.If opinion leaders in chaplaincywere to decide that this fieldcould and should embrace pa-tient-centered care as its collec-tive and distinctive quality im-provement goal, what couldthey then do to help working

chaplains bridge the quality gap in their own institutions?And what could this field do within the quality improvementmovement?

In addition to the basics—clarifying their own profession-al practice standards, supplying definitions and examples ofchaplains’ work that can be easily understood by professionalsin other health care fields—chaplaincy would need to gowhere the QI consensus is. They would need to look for op-portunities to join ongoing conversations on patient-centeredcare organized by the leading QI organizations. They wouldneed to conduct and support research on the chaplain’s role inpatient-centered care and advocate for better ways to assesschaplains’ work and impact in this area. They would need tosponsor workshops to teach chaplains how to design and eval-uate QI activities aimed at promoting patient-centered care,or support chaplains’ efforts to obtain this training elsewhere.And they would need to nurture visionaries: research-mindedchaplains who are passionate about the goal of patient-cen-tered care and who can encourage their colleagues, and thefield, to embrace and take pride in collective action towardthis goal.

This may seem a bit too much like biting a wall. If so, thenchaplaincy—like other health care professions—may want to

If chaplaincy cannot identify patient-centered care

as its distinctive quality improvement goal, then it ishard to make the case thatanother profession ought to.

18 H A S T I N G S C E N T E R R E P O R T November-December 2008

identify a particular challenge in patient-centered care andwork away at it. Improving palliative care offers one suchchallenge. Chaplains may work on palliative care teams, andpalliative care is an interdisciplinary field congenial to chap-lains and chaplaincy. The clinical practice guidelines releasedin 2004 by the National Consensus Project for Quality Pallia-tive Care are notably detailed in their attention to “spiritual,religious, and existential aspects of care” as part of the “pa-tient-and-family-centered-care” that should characterize qual-ity palliative care.9 The guidelines emphasize that quality in“spiritual, religious, and existential aspects of care,” like quali-ty in any other aspect of palliative care, should be evidence-based, consistently practiced, and continuously improved.10

There are acknowledged quality gaps in palliative care, andthere are acknowledged research gaps, too: practices that arenot yet fully informed by evidence or professional consen-sus.11 Chaplaincy could partner with researchers—and vision-aries—in palliative care to conduct research on quality in spir-itual, religious, and existential aspects of care, to disseminateresearch findings, and to advocate for the application of re-search to practice. If chaplaincy becomes—and is seen tobe—an ally of experts who seek to improve quality in pallia-tive care, then chaplains will be invited to contribute to futureclinical practice guidelines. These actions, over time, will im-prove palliative care, advance patient-centered care, and—notincidentally—add to the stature of chaplaincy as a field.Again, good tactics and good ethics.

Not all of the QI action takes place at the “profession” or“field” level. Working chaplains can also make patient-cen-tered care their institutional QI goal. This will be easier to doif their institution has already made its commitment to pa-tient-centered care clear by encouraging its departments todevelop QI projects toward this goal. It may also be easier forchaplains to develop substantive QI projects if their own pro-fession has already embraced patient-centered care as its col-lective QI goal. If chaplaincy is understood to be a QI-drivenprofession, then the institutional investment in professionalchaplaincy will be understood to bring QI benefits to the in-stitution.

From Theory to Practice

If a chaplaincy department embraced patient-centered careas its QI responsibility, institutionally as well as at the bedside,what would that look like? How does a chaplain take theplunge to design and test a patient-centered model of care?Here’s what the chaplaincy director at one hospital did.12 Inthe waiting rooms of the outpatient cancer program, postersand brochures invite outpatients and family caregivers to di-rectly contact various social support services—social work,psychiatry, chaplaincy, and patient representatives. Few pa-tients or families did so. Most referrals came from hospitalstaff, usually after a crisis erupted. Patients and families whowere referred to these services consistently reported, via fol-low-up surveys, that they were highly satisfied with the carethey received. The verbal surveys conducted by a team com-

posed of representatives of the supportive services also re-vealed that these patients and families had not found thoseposters and brochures to be helpful. It was only after they hadmet the social workers, counselors, chaplains, or patient repsthat they understood what these staff members did and howthey could help.

Guided by the survey responses, and working from the hy-pothesis that introducing patients and families to services theymight need and want (and could request on their own) wouldadvance patient-centered care, team members began to talkabout developing an orientation session for all new patients inthis system. But how to broach this with hospital administra-tion? One team member, the chaplaincy director, took advan-tage of a training session offered as part of the hospital’s QIprogram. Through this training, she made new contacts in

There is little data about chaplains’ involvement in or at-titudes toward QI in the institutions where they work.

To fill this gap, the Professional Chaplains and Health CareQuality Improvement project conducted focus groups in2007 with chaplains in New York, Illinois, Arizona, andCalifornia. This IRB-approved study was designed and di-rected by George Fitchett, director of research in the De-partment of Religion, Health and Human Values at RushUniversity Medical Center, with colleagues ClaytonThomason and Kathryn A. Lyndes.

Most focus group participants were board-certifiedchaplains (74 percent) who worked in hospitals (82 per-cent); the average participant had worked as a chaplain forthirteen years.

Key findings:

• Chaplains have a strong commitment to providingquality spiritual care. However, they are frequentlyskeptical about QI as an institutional activity. Theymay resist QI language and methods that focus onquantity of care—“making the numbers”—rather thanquality of care.

• Chaplains who are involved in quality improvement intheir own departments may not use QI language orconnect their efforts to institutional QI.

• Chaplains are eager to learn more about promising ef-forts to improve quality in chaplaincy and how to con-duct meaningful quality improvement projects.

Research findings will be reported in journal articles. Fora summary of this study, go to the project’s Web page,http://www.thehastingscenter.org/Research/Detail.aspx?id=1212.

What Do Health Care Chaplains Think about QI?

H A S T I N G S C E N T E R R E P O R T 19November-December 2008

her institution and was able to bring fresh insights to her teamon how to develop their idea into a full-fledged QI project.

The orientation sessions, which are optional and open tolongstanding patients as well as new patients, are now offeredtwice a month in the waiting rooms of the outpatient clinics.At each session, at least three members of the project team—consisting of a social worker, case manager, patient represen-tative, chaplain, and psychologist—introduce themselves anddescribe what they and their departments can do for patientsand families, based on what other patients and families havefound helpful in managing similar diagnoses and treatments.Team members have noticed that the interactive format of theorientation prompts patients and families to pick up and askquestions about the existing educational material they hadpreviously overlooked, even though it was in plain sight inevery waiting room. Team members have also drafted a newbrochure describing some of the common issues faced by can-cer patients and their families. This brochure is “patient-cen-tered,” not “discipline-centered,” so patients will not be re-quired to think about their own needs in terms of medical jar-gon or departmental boundaries.

The project is ongoing, but to date, the outcomes have in-cluded:

• immediate and positive feedback from orientation partici-pants, who appreciate the opportunity to meet hospital staffperson-to-person, in the outpatient setting, where there isno crisis-driven agenda to increase tension;

• an increase in direct referrals from patients and familymembers; and

• far greater awareness of supportive services among the on-cologists and nurses who work in the outpatient clinics.

These clinicians are now asking members of the orientationteam for detailed guidance on making referrals. Team mem-bers have collaboratively developed a referral algorithm andreferral form to help direct clinicians’ referrals to the appro-priate departments. These tools are patient-centered in thatthey allow medical staff to be guided by their patient’s ex-pressed concerns and their own clinical observations, ratherthan requiring them to guess which department should getthe referral. The referrals come to the team, whose memberscollaborate to sort them in terms of the interventions needed.Since the start of this QI project, referrals to supportive ser-vices from outpatient medical staff have doubled. As thesenew referrals are not crisis-driven, they can be managed by ex-isting supportive services staff.

The chaplaincy director and the other project designershave observed another, unanticipated outcome. The same

medical staff has begun to ask them for help in talking withanother group of patients and families about another prob-lem: the transition from outpatient medical care to hospice.These clinicians had been unsure about when it was appro-priate to bring up hospice in the outpatient setting, and theyhad fallen into a habit of admitting patients with end-stagedisease to the hospital for the transition to hospice. By pro-viding patients and families with support at the beginning oftheir relationship with cancer care providers, and by becom-ing an ongoing resource to medical professionals, this team isimproving the quality of care in their institution in anotherway, by helping patients near the end of life avoid an unnec-essary hospital admission.

Innovation begets innovation. And steadily, the wall comesdown.

1. Institute of Medicine, Crossing the Quality Chasm (Washington,D.C.: Institute of Medicine, 2001), 5-6; http://www.nap.edu/open-book.php?isbn=0309072808.

2. M.A. Baily et al., “The Ethics of Using QI Methods to ImproveHealth Care Quality and Safety,” Hastings Center Report Special Report36, no. 4 (2006): S3.

3. Some hospitals use “PI”—performance improvement—methods,which emphasize the role of human performance in the delivery ofhealth care, but both PI and QI are systematic and data-guided, and ac-cording to one recent assessment, “there is no discrete boundary be-tween them.” T. Bornstein, “Quality Improvement and PerformanceImprovement: Different Means to the Same End?” QA Brief, USAID-sponsored Quality Assurance Project, Spring 2001. This working defin-ition of QI should, therefore, work for chaplains in “PI” institutions.Similarly, this working definition should work for chaplains in institu-tions that may use a particular QI method, such as Six Sigma.

4. Institute for Healthcare Improvement, “Patient-Centered Care:General,” http://www.ihi.org/IHI/Topics/PatientCenteredCare/Patient-CenteredCareGeneral/.

5. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, “Expanding Patient-Centered Care To Empower Patients and Assist Providers,” Research inAction, issue 5 (2002), under subtitle, “Health Care Evolves Toward aPatient-Centered Model,” http://www.ahrq.gov/qual/ptcareria.htm.

6. Institute of Medicine, Crossing the Quality Chasm, 6.7. National Quality Forum, “NQF Brochure,” 2004,

http://216.122.138.39/pdf/NQFbrochure2004.pdf.8. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, “Closing the Quality

Gap: A Critical Analysis of Quality Improvement Strategies,” TechnicalReview 9 (2005): 1, http://www.ahrq.gov/downloads/pub/evidence/pdf/qualgap3/qualgap3.pdf.

9. National Consensus Project for Quality Palliative Care, ClinicalPractice Guidelines for Quality Palliative Care, 5-6, http://www.national-consensusproject.org.

10. Ibid., 29.11. Ibid., 41-42.12. Unpublished case study supplied to author by a chaplaincy direc-

tor, May 2008. Some identifying details have been changed.

Nancy Berlinger, PhD, MDiv, project codirector, is deputydirector and research scholar at The Hastings Center. She isthe author of After Harm: Medical Error and the Ethics ofForgiveness (Johns Hopkins, paperback 2007), and directsthe Center’s Guidelines on End of Life Care project.

Wendy Cadge, PhD, is an assistant professor of sociologyat Brandeis University, where she teaches the sociology ofreligion and of health and medicine. She has interviewedmore than one hundred hospital chaplains, nurses, andphysicians for her current research project on the historicaland current institutional presence of religion and spirituali-ty in hospitals.

Raymond de Vries, PhD, is an associate professor in theBioethics Program at the University of Michigan School ofMedicine. He is a coeditor of The View from Here: Bioethicsand the Social Sciences (Blackwell, 2007).

Rev. Martha R. Jacobs, DMin, MDiv, project codirector, isa board-certified chaplain and the associate director of out-reach and community-based programs at HealthCareChaplaincy. She is the managing editor of PlainViews, anelectronic newsletter for chaplains and other spiritual careproviders.

Margaret E. Mohrmann, MD, PhD, is the Emily Davieand Joseph S. Kornfeld Foundation Professor of BiomedicalEthics at the University of Virginia, where she is also pro-fessor of pediatrics and medical education and associateprofessor of religious studies and directs the Program inBiomedical Ethics. She is the author of Attending Children:A Doctor’s Education (Georgetown, 2005) and Medicine AsMinistry: Reflections on Suffering, Ethics, and Hope (PilgrimPress, 1995) and the coeditor of Pain Seeking Understand-ing: Suffering, Medicine, and Faith (Pilgrim Press, 1999).

Martin L. Smith, STD, MDiv, is director of clinical ethicsin the Department of Bioethics at the Cleveland Clinic. Hehas served on the Clinical Pastoral Education ProfessionalAdvisory Committees at the University of Texas M.D.Anderson Cancer Center and at the Cleveland Clinic, andhas developed and taught bioethics modules for the CPEprograms at both institutions.

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