Chaplaincy: The Path of Spiritual Care
Chaplains offer a compassionate caring presence, reflective and empathic listening, sensitively-offered comfort and solace, emotional support, and attuned, interfaith/secular spiritual care as sought and might include prayer or other secular or spiritual rituals.
Populations
- Chronic, life-limited, and terminally-ill patients
- Family members of the aged, seriously/terminally-ill
- In-home caregivers of the seriously/terminally ill
- Medical caregivers (nurse, doctors, therapists, social workers)
- Family members of the mentally/developmentally disabled
- Those living with undiagnosed illness and auto-immune disease
Health and Medical Chaplaincy Services
- Compassionate presence
- Reflective listening
- Emotional support
- Spiritual care: poetry, blessing, prayer, silence
- Ritual: candles, incense, chanting
- Life review: patient and family member interviews for written and photographic recording
- Spiritual inquiry: exploration of self as a spiritual being
- End-of-life: medical ethics consultation and advocacy
- Advance Directives: paperwork
- Trauma Support
- Loss, grief, bereavement
- Memorial services
Related Groups
- Group: “A Practice for Loss: Transforming Our Relationship to Impermanence”
- Group: “Compassion, Equanimity, and Resilience for Family Caregivers”