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 hospitalized at an area hospital. one of the things we mate wonder about is how do we access a chaplain or someone from the spiritual care department at the hospital? with me is reverend peter clark, 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 spiritual care services are at hospitals and how does one access a chaplain if one wants to see 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 are very fully staffed with chaplains like ucsf and other hospitals that are smaller may have one or two to cover the entire patient census which can make it difficult for the chaplain to see each and every patient. >> of course. then you have to be prepared to ask to see the chaplain. >> that's true. it's okay to ask. the joint commission which accredits hospitals says each and every patient deserves to have their spiritual needs met as well as their physical needs while in the hospital. chaplains are a way hospitals can guarantee spiritual needs are addressed. >> in your experience as a chaplain, you have been a chaplain for? >> over 20 years. >> in a variety of different hospitals. we'll get to that. what's your sense about people wanting to see a chaplain to help with physical needs? >> my experience has been

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 very caring individuals and got into medicine because they wanted to help people. 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 to 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 bodies. 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 if only at that moment. i have someone who can hear my concerns, my anxiety, my hopes and possibly serve as a conduit in order to better my care. >> there is a connection between faith and health and hopefully the chaplain will help bridge that connection. >> ideally the chaplain will be a member of the team of people seeing that connection, that the chaplain is sort of like the specialist on the team but the physician and nurses and social workers and everybody else caring for the patient would also be paying attention to the importance of spirituality and the patient's religious faith if the patient has one, that we would all be paying attention to it. the chaplain is the specialist, so we are listening carefully, seeking to lift up emotional and spiritual concerns that the patient might have. then to make sure we are

addressing them correctly or connecting to resources that can help them and communicating to other members of the team so they're aware of it. >> we'll be back in a minute and hear more about special services that chaplains provide in the hospitals on mosaic. [piano playing slow tune]

announcer: don't wait. communicate. make your emergency plan today. 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, either we end up in the hospital or a family member ends up in the hospital and we want a chaplain to be part of our care. you have had a recent hospitalization and 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 offering comfort and care. now i was in the bed looking at those caring for me. i was cognitively aware of what they were doing for the most part, but i was not prepared for the amount of feeling i would have about being ill, being in the hospital,

recovering from surgery. i had help because i had plenty chaplain friends coming by and visiting and offering me the care i would offer often to patients. i was struck by how pervasive the feelings of helplessness and vulnerability were and how much i needed company of friends, family, 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 warten. she says there are two ways of

spreading light. be the candle or be the mirror that reflects it. when i am chaplain and seeing a patient, i am getting a piece of how the patient's home and spirituality are shaping the patient. if they're connected to soul and spirituality, then their candle is burning brightly. all i have to do is reflect it back like a good mirror. there are other patients where 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 to bolster their own

connection, not to bring my own religious faith in and try to persuade the person to be baptist or presbyterian or whatever, but instead of use my spiritualities a a way of bolstering their own. >> that's a wonderful image. you are not just dealing with the patient. you might be interacting with family or the patient is unconscious. then your care would be for the family members at that point. >> although i would say that my care is still to the patient. >> okay. >> even if the patient is unconscious, when i walk in, i always introduce myself to the patient. we do not know for sure what the patient is hearing or not hearing, experiencing or not experiencing even if we have been told they're unconscious. >> a very, 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? >> well, it is 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 to them. often times it involves 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. 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. so they want to record something or write something for the grandchild to read later. that way they can pass on their wisdom or love to the person they barely met or maybe have not met yet.

finding ways for the person to do something purposeful or meaningful in the final days is often times what the chaplain ends up doing with the family, the patient. >> that's a beautiful scenario, if only that happened every time. >> yes. >> we do the best we can. at uc, you have a large staff of chaplains. some are on staff and some are training to the chaplains or pastors. >> that's correct. >> tell us about what you have there. >> we have staff chaplains and in addition we have students in clinical pastoral education which is a nationally accredited program that provide training in real world experience in healthcare to seminarians, to clergy, and to interested lay persons who want to learn more about what it's like to serve as a chaplain or who want to sharpen skills with sitting with people in crisis.

uc has had this program since 1961. there are a number of accredited centers throughout the bay area that offer the training. but we have one of the larger programs. >> as you said, you don't have to be a pastor to participate. >> that's correct. >> is there a waiting list? >> no. we usually can fit people in. we do get a lot of people who apply over the year. training usually starts in september until the next september. >> so it's a year long program. we will hear more from pastor about uc and hospital chaplains when we come back.

good morning. welcome back to mosaic. with me is chaplain peter clark director of spiritual care services 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 those 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 from you. 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 initial visits where they're coming to the units every day and seeing patients as they're coming into the hospital. ucsf, we have such a large department a we are able to do a lot of routine initial visits where we are introducing ourselves to patients and they've been in the hospital

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 mind now because of the lenten season is that i was on call one night, ash wednesday. earlier my colleagues had been around the hospital applying ashes to whomever asked. i was doing routine rounds and i met on man in the oncology unit. 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 so he hadn't received his ashes. he knew it was ash wednesday.

he asked can i have ashes? i said of course, i will get them. i went to the chapel and got ashes and came back upstairs. he had gone around to all the rooms on the unit and he had gotten people to come out of their rooms if they could. he had gotten them in his room. we were all gathered there together. i decided well he is a clergy person too. i will let him administer the ashes and i will be his assistant. so he led 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 and 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. i still carry it with me. >> tell us about then your vision for hospital chaplains and what their role is in the hospital. >> of course. so a good way of describing khalid khalid describing chaplains is to use an analogy. say you have a routine medical condition. your doctor knows you well, has seen you time and time again and is able to handle routine medical needs. but if you have a major medical condition that's 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 with your specific illness or disease. chaplains are a lot like the specialists. we are not there to substitute

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

are. 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 clearly. the team may be trying to communicate things to the family members, to the patient. they need some interpretation if you will. sometimes we can translator interpret some of the concerns and needs, some of the issues that the team is thinking about and help the patient and family members to understand what the needs are. >> the 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 for that yet. the chaplain is wanting to hear the concerns, hear what their issues and questions are, make sure the team knows about them so the team can interpret and go back to the patient and seek to answer the questions. we're with peter clark who is the director of spiritual care services at uc san francisco learning about important ministry of hospital chaplains. we'll be back in a minute. [ 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.

welcome back to mosaic. i am with pastor peter clark. he is director of spiritual care services at uc san francisco. we are learning about the ministry of 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 crisis 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 help bolster people's spirit so we don't get patients beyond the breaking patient. and what i have learned is how important hope is for people. there is a french philosopher named gabriel marcel and says 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 this desperate time. because that's going to be like breathing. even if they have been told that you may not have much longer to live, there are reasons for hope even in those moments. hope for significant connection with loved ones, hope for 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 other colleagues, if we can help people connect to that even at the end of their lives, then we are helping sustain their sense of hopefulness so they can face the end of their lives with the same integrity and strength that they've lived their lives. >> yes. 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. >> that's true. >> 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 and see the doctors, 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 oh i am on the edge, in the corner, will try not to get in your way. but we have found chaplains provide an essential service. that service is valued by other members of the team and by patients and their families. >> yes. so the students learn that they can step up and take their place at the patient's bed side and say i am here to serve you, here to help you. i am going to do my best. i am not going to get 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 themselves in the hospital to ask for the chaplain to visit if you don't

have someone from your church or synagogue that will visit you. this is the lenten season as we are moving closer to easter, 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.

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