Shaping the Future of Spiritual Care: Insights from Australia 

Tuesday, September 19th @ 5:00PM (EST) / 4:00PM (CST) 

Description

Creating a vision for the future requires knowledge of the past and a deep understanding of and immersion in the current context. This presentation will provide insights from my PhD into the factors and influences that have shaped spiritual care in the Australian context. These insights have already informed future planning for the full integration of spiritual care in Australia and may provide guidance for international colleagues.

Presenter

Cheryl Holmes, OAM, has extensive training and professional experience in healthcare, spiritual care and organizational change and management. She began employment as a speech pathologist before moving into spiritual care positions at state and national levels. She was appointed Chief Executive Officer to Spiritual Health Association in 2002. She completed a Masters in 2014 focused on management & leadership and a PhD in 2023 exploring the narratives shaping the future of spiritual care in Australian public hospitals. She was awarded an Order of Australia Medal for her spiritual care roles in the health sector on Australia Day 2015.

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Provision of Chaplaincy Services in U.S. Hospitals: A Strategic Conformity Perspective 

Tuesday, October 10th @ 1:30PM (EST) / 12:30PM (CST) 

Description

Increasingly, hospitals are expected to provide patient-centered care that attends to patients’ health needs, including spiritual care needs. However, hospitals do not uniformly conform to the expectation of making chaplaincy services available. This webinar will present results from research using the nationwide American Hospital Association Annual Survey to describe the organizational and environmental factors that contributed to the provision of chaplaincy services in U.S. (adult) hospitals in the years 2010-2019.

Presenters

Kelsey White, PhD is a board certified chaplain, Assistant Professor, and the Chaplaincy Faculty Researcher in the Department of Patient Counseling at the College of Health Professions, Virginia Commonwealth University. Dr. White is a health services researcher whose research focuses on the access to and quality of professional spiritual care in health systems. She is also currently the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Health Care Chaplaincy.

Shoou-Yih Daniel Lee, PhD, is the inaugural Martha V. and Wickliffe S. Lyne Professor of Health Administration at the College of Health Professions, Virginia Commonwealth University. Dr. Lee is a health services researcher with a disciplinary background in organizational and medical sociology. The goal of his research is to improve health care delivery through critical examination of factors that drive organizational as well as individual decisions and behaviors.

Respondent

Wendy Cadge, PhD, Professor of Sociology and Barbara Mandel Professor of Humanistic Social Sciences, Brandeis University and Founder and Director, Chaplaincy Innovation Lab.

*White, K.B., Lee, S-H., Jennings, J.C., Karimi, S., Johnson, C.E., & Fitchett, G. (in press). Provision of Chaplaincy Services in U.S. Hospitals: A Strategic Conformity Perspective. Health Care Management Review.

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Religion as a Social Determinant of Health in Older Adults: Exploring Religious Attendance, Importance & Affiliation as predictors of Adult Mortality

Thursday, October 12th @ 1:00PM (EST) / 12:00PM (CST) 

Description

This webinar features Dr. Ellen Idler who will discuss her studies of religion as a social determinant of health.  The World Health Organization’s definition of social determinants of health is “the circumstance in which we are born, grown up, live, work, and age,” among which Dr. Idler argues religion should be considered.  Many older adults who live in long-term care have spent a lifetime attending and being socially active at church. Do the services provided in long term care meet the need of residents for this critical source of support and social ties? Chaplains are sometimes the sole source of religious and spiritual support for residents in long-term care.

Presenter

Ellen Idler, PhD is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Sociology, and Director of Emory’s Religion and Public Health Collaborative, with additional Emory appointments at the Rollins School of Public Health, the Center for Ethics, and the Graduate Division of Religion.  She earned her PhD from Yale University and held a fellowship at Union Theological Seminary in New York.  Dr. Idler is a Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America.  She served as Chair of the American Sociological Association’s Section on Aging and the Life Course and received its’ 2021 Matilda White Riley Distinguished Scholar Award.  She studies the influence of attitudes, beliefs, and social connections on health, including the effect of self-ratings of health on mortality and disability, and the impact of religious participation on health.  Her research papers have been cited over 20,000 times.  She is an Academic Editor for PLoS One and Editorial Board member for Innovation in Aging and Palliative Care and Social Practice.

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Quality Improvement and Falls Prevention

Wednesday, November 1st @ 2:00PM (EST) / 1:00PM (CST) 

Description

In 2021, Mark Bradley took part in the ILT (Improvement Leader Training) program at Northwestern Medicine. He coordinated an improvement project focused on patient falls prevention. Patient falls prevention is a high priority in health care organizations. The chaplain team used Motivational Interviewing (an evidence-based practice) to inform their interventions. The work of the chaplains significantly decreased patient falls and dramatically demonstrated the value of professional chaplains to the organization.

Presenter

Mark Bradley is the manager of Spiritual care and Education at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, IL. Mark completed his MDiv in 1994 at Acadia Divinity College in Wolfville, NS, Canada. In 1999, he completed a DMin from Northern Seminary in Lombard, IL. For over a decade, he worked with The Night Ministry’s outreach and health ministry providing care for unhoused individuals in Chicago. In 2014, Mark came to Northwestern Memorial Hospital. Mark is an ordained minister in the Metro of Chicago region of the American Baptist Churches. He is an ACPE Certified Educator and a board-certified chaplain with the Association of Professional Chaplains.

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Religious Accommodation in the Time of Covid: Our Blessing and Our Burden

Thursday, November 9th @ 2:00PM (EST) / 1:00PM (CST) 

Description

Mandatory COVID-19 vaccination requirements for healthcare workers in the United States, instituted at the height of the pandemic to protect vulnerable patients and preserve the infrastructure of healthcare, nonetheless met with resistance by some members of the work force. As unprecedented numbers of employees sought religious accommodations, chaplains were recruited by institutional leadership to adjudicate these requests, either alone or as part of a committee.

This webinar presents core findings of a research study examining both the blessings and burdens of chaplain involvement in that review process. It invites bedside chaplains, leaders of spiritual care departments, chaplain educators, and hospital administrators to explore opportunities for “value-added” beyond bedside spiritual care and to proactively address chaplain moral distress arising from conflicts between their own political, ethical, and religious beliefs and those of the patients and healthcare works they serve.

Moderator and Panelists

Benjamin Schaefer, M.Div., BCC
Manager of Spiritual Care, Ascension Michigan, Mid/North and Southwest Michigan Ministries
Convener, Transforming Chaplaincy Spiritual Care Managers Network

Patricia K. Palmer, MDiv, BCC, MSPH
Manager of Research Projects in Spiritual Health, Woodruff Health Sciences Center, Emory University; RL102 Research Literacy course instructor, Rush University

Rev. Carla Price, JD, MDiv, BCC
Manager, Department of Pastoral Care
University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB)

M. Jeanne Wirpsa, MA, BCC, HEC-C
Clinical Ethicist and Program Director, Medical Ethics
Northwestern Memorial Hospital

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We’re proud to feature the Article of the Month from ACPE Research. We’re grateful to editor John Ehman for sharing his work here and encourage you to take advantage of this valuable resource.