good morning. welcome to mosaic. i am pastor at st. mark's lutheran church. on behalf of my cohost and our wonderful producer, welcome and good morning to you. inevitably we might find ourselves or a family member hospital eyed at an area hospital. one of the things we might wonder about is how to access a chaplain or someone from the spiritual care department at the hospital. i am with the director of spiritual care services at uc san francisco health. you have been there eight years

now. welcome to mosaic. >> thank you. it's good to be here. >> it's wonderful to have you here. i recently found myself at the hospital for two weeks. i wasn't hospitalized but i was with a family member hospitalized. not once at that particular hospital did anyone offer a chaplain or spiritual care services. it made me wonder how prevalent the services are at hospitals and how does one access a chaplain if one wants a chaplain? >> chaplains are available at most large hospitals. in most cases if a family member or patient wanted to speak with a chaplain it would be as simple as telling your nurse or physician you would like to speak with a chaplain. different hospitals have different staffing ratios. some hospitals are very fully

staffed like ucsf and other hospitals are smaller and may have one or two chaplains to cover the patient census which can make it difficult for the chaplain to see the patients each day. >> of course. then you have to ask. >> exactly. and it's okay to ask. each and every patient deserves to have their spiritual needs met as well as physical needs while in the hospital. chaplains are a way hospitals can guarantee that the spiritual needs are addressed. >> in your experience as a chaplain. you have been a chaplain how long? >> over 20 years. >> in a variety of different hospitals. we'll get into that further into the interview. what's your sense about people wanting to see a chaplain to help them with their physical needs? >> my experience has been that chaplains are providing a listening ear that other

disciplines in the hospital want to offer but often cannot. physicians for example, a lot of them are caring individuals and got into medicine because they wanted to help people. but they have a lot of work to do in a very brief time. their conversations with patients are extremely targeted and by necessity quite brief. >> what would be the unique role that the chaplain plays with the patient? >> the chaplain is there to help hear the patient's story. each of us when we go into the hospital, we are experiencing a variety of feelings about being in the hospital. we are vulnerable. often times, we feel powerless. we don't have control over our routines or even our own bodies. so if somebody comes in to sit with me and says i want to hear what's going on, i want to hear how you are doing, then i have control over what's going on in my life if only for that

moment. i have someone who can hear my concerns, hear my anxiety, hear my hopes, possibly serve as a conduit with the other members of the team. >> hopefully there is a connection between faith and hope and the chaplain can bridge that connection. >> the chaplain ideally is a member of a whole team of people. everyone would be paying attention to the importance of spirituality, the patient's religious faith if the patient has one. the chaplain is the specialist. we are listening carefully. we are seeking to lift up emotional and spiritual concerns that the patient might have. then make sure that we address

them or connect them to resources that can connect them. >> we'll be back in a minute and hear more about the special services chaplains provide in hospitals, on mosaic. [ cell phone rings ] >> yeah, i'm watching it too. i see them every day. >> the curtains, they're always drawn in this place. >> i know. >> that guy, it seems like he's in charge of them.

i don't know, i don't feel very good about this. >> we have to report this. >> yes, absolutely. good morning. we are back on mosaic.

with me is reverend peter clark, director of spiritual care services at uc san francisco health. as we were talking earlier, we end up in the hospital or a family member is in the hospital and we want a chaplain to be part of our care. you have a recent hospitalization, personal experience. how was that for you? >> for me it was a profoundly changing experience because i had to undergo major surgery. for many years, i had been on the side of the bed looking at the patient and offering comfort and care. now i was in the bed looking up at all the people caring for me. while i was cognitively aware of what they were doing for the most part, i was not prepared for the amount of feeling i would have about being ill, being in the hospital, recovering from surgery.

you know, i had help because i had plenty chaplain friends who were coming and visit me and offering the care i would offer often to patients. but i was struck by how pervasive the feelings of helplessness and vulnerability were and how much i needed the company of friends, family, and loved ones and also caring professionals. my physician was extremely competent and caring. the nurses were consistently so. when i did receive a visit from a chaplain it was quite reassuring to have him there. >> in what way was the chaplain reassuring? in other words, what's the best kind of pastoral care that can be offered to a patient? >> well, the way i usually answer this is by quoting edith wore ton. she says there are two ways of spreading light. to be the candle or to be the mirror that reflects it.

as a chap lane, when i go in to see a patient, i am getting a sense of how that patient's hope, faith, sense of spirituality are forming and shaping that person in the moment. if that person seems to be strongly connected to a sense of spirit, soul, spirituality, then their candle is already burning. all i do is reflect that back to them like a good mirror. other patients, if i go to see them, they're feeling despair, anxious, concern, all natural human things to feel as i myself experienced. in that case their candle may not be burning brightly. my job as chaplain is to let my candle shine a little bit more and see if i can offer some of my calmness, some of my own sense of hope and connection to the sacred as a way of helping bolster their own connection, not to bring my own religious faith in and try to persuade

the person to become baptist or presbyterian but instead use my spirituality as a way of bolstering their own, helping them tap into their sense of spirituality. >> that's a wonderful image. you are not just dealing with the patient. you might be interacting with family or the patient is unconscious so then your care would be for the family members at that point. >> although i would say that my care still to the patient. even if the patient is unconscious, when i walk in, i always introduce myself to the patient. we do not know what the patient is hearing or not hearing, experiencing or not experiencing, even if we are told they are unconscious. >> very good point. let's go to someone who might be at the end of their life and you are with family members, how might you provide pastoral care in that particular setting? >> it's going to depend a lot

upon what they need obviously. my job is to assess, to get a sense of what might be important for them, what might be meaningful for them. often it involves having a conversation with the patient if the patient is able to have that conversation. find out what is meaningful, what is of value for that patient right now and in the days or weeks that the patient has left, are there certain things they need to say, certain people they need to be in contact with, certain tasks they want to perform? maybe there is a grandchild they want to speak to and they know the grandchild will not be able to understand them. they want to record something or write something down for the grandchild to read later. that way they can pass on their wisdom, pass on their love to the person that they just met or maybe haven't met yet. finding ways to do something meaningful and purposeful even

in final days is often what the chaplain ends up doing with the family or patient. >> that's a beautiful scenario, if only that happened every time. we do the best we can. at uc, you have a large staff of chaplains. some are on staff and some are training to be pastors or chaplains. >> that's correct. >> say a word about what you have at uc san francisco. >> we have staff chaplains. in addition, we have students in a training program called clinical pastoral education which is a nationally accredited program that provide training and real world experience in healthcare to seminarians, clergy, to interested lay persons who want to learn more about what it is like to serve as chaplain or who want to sharpen skills sitting with people in crisis for work in local congregations or other settings. uc has had this program since 1961. there are a number of

accredited centers throughout the bay area that offer this training. we have one of the larger programs. >> as you said, you don't have to be a pastor to participate in the program. >> that's correct. >> is there a waiting list? >> we usually can fit people in. we do get a lot of people who apply over the course of the year. the training normally starts in september and goes until the next september for the year long program. >> a year long program. we will hear more from the pastor about uc and ministry of hospital chaplains when we get back.

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announcer: don't wait. communicate. make your emergency plan today. good morning. welcome back to mosaic. i am with the director of spiritual care services at uc san francisco health. we were sharing stories about hospitalizations.

i was in the hospital visiting a family member. the only sign of anything religious was a small meditation room tucked way in the corner of the hospital. i just stumbled into it. it was a disappointment to me that the services weren't more obvious for patients to take advantage of. as you have said, different hospitals have different staffing levels but you have to ask. that's my biggest take away. you have to ask to have a chaplain visit. >> in most cases, that's true. in some hospitals, if they have a very well staffed department they might be doing routine visits will they come every day and see patients as they're coming into the hospital. ucsf, we have such a large department that we are able to do a lot of routine initial visits when introducing ourselves to patients and they have been in the hospital for less than a day or perhaps a

day. other hospitals, it may be a few days before a chaplain can do a routine visit. >> you have been in this ministry for 20 plus years. you must have a story or two to tell about what's touched your spirit serving as hospital chaplain. >> actually the story that comes to my mind because of the lent season is i was on call one night and it was ash wednesday. earlier in the day colleagues had been around applying ashes to forehead of anyone who was interested. i was doing my routine rounds and met a man on the oncology unit. it turned out he was a methodist minister in for chemotherapy. apparently the chaplain had not been to his room or had come by but he wasn't in the room. he had not received his ashes. he knew it was ash wednesday so he asked me "can i have ashes"?

i said of course, i will get them. i went to the chapel and got them. by the time i got back he had gone around to all the rooms in the unit and got people out of their rooms if they could and he had gotten them in his room. we were gathered together. i decided i will let him administer the ashes and i will be his assistant. he led an ash wednesday service from his bed and applied ashes to all the foreheads of the people there. it was a really profound experience for me as well as for him. what it taught me was that for this man who had been a clergy man all his life, serving people in this way was extremely important. he needed to have a way of doing it even if he was just a patient in a hospital bed. so my ministry to him that night was to let him be a

pastor. >> make space for that. >> exactly. that has stayed with me. that happened in my second year of training and i still carry it with me. >> tell us about then your vision or hospital chaplains and what their role is in the hospital. >> of course. a good way of describing chaplains is to use an analogy. say you have a routine medical condition. you would probably go see a general practitioner, internal medicine physician. that's somebody who probably knows you well, has seen you time and time again over the years, and is able to handle routine medical needs. if you have a major medical condition coming up, that person is probably going to refer you to a specialist, somebody really trained in a particular area of medicine who can help you with your illness or disease. chaplains are like the specialists. we are not there to substitute

or supplant the local clergy person, person providing you with your regular religious care. we are there because we are in the specialized hospital or healthcare setting and are attuned to issues and dynamics that come up when people are dealing with serious illness. we are assessing that, offering care tailored for that. once you are well enough to leave the hospital, you go back to your normal practitioner, parish clerky person -- clergy person. >> how do chaplains serve with the rest of the team? >> we serve as bridges. we are listening to the story, listening to family. we are hearing their concerns and we are assessing those through the lens of spiritual and emotional concerns which other members of the team are listening for but not with the same attentiveness we are. then we bridge what the patient

and family are saying. we bring the story to the team and make sure that the team is hearing that. the team may be trying to communicate things from the family to the patient and they need interpretation, if you will. sometimes we can translator interpret some concerns or needs or some issues that the team is thinking about and help the patient and family to understand what the needs are. >> most common concerns and needs that you hear? >> frequently, it's around the goals of treatment. like what are we hoping to do with the treatment? what's the chance of success? what's the likelihood i am going to recover? if i am struggling with the prognosis, say i have been told i am terminally ill and that's a struggle for me, the team may be wanting to help introduce the idea of palliative care but the family and patient may not

be ready. the chaplain will hear the concerns, hear what their issues and questions are, make sure the team knows about them so the team can interpret them and go to the patient to seek to answer the questions. >> we are with peter clark, collector of spiritual care services at uc san francisco learning about important ministry of hospital chaplains. we'll be back in a minute.

>> welcome back to mosaic. i am with pastor peter clark, director of spiritual care services at uc san francisco. we are learning about hospital chaplains and this important ministry that's integral to healthcare in hospitals. you have seen a lot of patients. you have provided pastoral care yourself. what have you learned about the human spirit? >> well it really is true for many of us, the spirit is a very resilient thing in us. it helps us to deal with a lot of crises and stress that can come our way. like anything that is resilient, it has a stretching point beyond which it can break. so part of the work that

chaplains and social workers and others on the healthcare team can do is to help bolster people's spirit so we don't get patients beyond that breaking point. what i have learned is how important hope is for people. there is a french philosopher who says that hope is for the soul what breathing is for the living organism. so if we are there to help somebody who is in serious distress, part of our task is to help them to find their sense of hope even in the desperate time. because that's going to be like breathing. even if they have been told you may not have much longer to live, there are still reasons for hope even in those moments for a significant connection with loved ones, hope for a stronger relationship with god or the sacred, however the person defines it. hope for leaving a legacy for

others after me. if i as chaplain and my colleagues, if we can help people to connect to that even at the end of their lives, we are helping sustain their hopefulness so they can face the end of their lives with the integrity and strength that they've lived their lives. >> of course with the students that you have with you in the cpe program, you are trying to model and teach them that. you have students from all different faith backgrounds as i understand it. what do you find their biggest learning is in the chaplain program that you provide? >> i think the biggest thing students learn is how important their role is. when you go into a hospital setting, you see the doctors, see the nurses, you know they're important. they carry themselves with a certain quality, a command of the atmosphere, command of the

climate. chaplains tend to think of ourselves of i am on the edge, on the corner, will try not to get in your way. we have found that chaplains provide an essential service. that service is valued by other members of the team by patients and their families. >> yes. >> so the students learn that they can step up and take their place at the patients' bed side saying i am here to serve you. i am here to help you. i am going to do my best. i am not going to be intimidated by this environment. i am going to step up and claim my place as your caregiver. >> i think with those words, that will remind all of us whether we find ourselves in the hospital or a family member finds ourselves in the hospital to ask for your chaplain or ask for the chaplain to visit if you don't have someone from

your church or synagogue that would visit you. this is the lenten season as we are moving closer to easter and season of new life, resurrection of christ. certainly chaplains bring that new life and hope to everyone in the hospitals. on behalf of mosaic, my colleagues, thank you so much. >> thank you. >> peter clark, ucsf.