Human. Chaplain.

What does it take to offer meaningful spiritual care within the realities of today’s U.S. healthcare system?

As a hospice chaplain, I’ve been asking myself that question a lot lately.

The more I reflect on it, the more I find myself returning to one idea: healthcare chaplaincy is, in many ways, an act of translation.

We help healthcare understand chaplaincy. We help chaplains understand healthcare. We translate spiritual concerns into language that supports team-based care. We translate research into practice. We translate Medicare requirements into meaningful care. Sometimes we’re also translating between colleagues that don’t even realize they’re speaking different professional languages.

This fall, I hope you’ll join me in exploring that idea in conversation on my upcoming posts and an online peer support group for hospice chaplains I’ll be offering in partnership with the Spiritual Care Collaborative beginning in October.

Some of the topics I’m hoping to explore include:

Working Within Healthcare

• Embedding chaplaincy within interdisciplinary teams
• Building trust across disciplines
• Collaborating with social workers, nurses, physicians, and aides
• Balancing productivity with presence
• Navigating caseloads, triage, and competing priorities

Seeing the Whole Person

• Tracking decline while tending to the whole person
• Establishing a spiritual and psychosocial baseline
• Understanding spiritual, psychosocial, and functional decline together

Documentation & Demonstrating Value

• Writing readable, useful chaplain notes
• Structured spiritual assessment
• Measuring outcomes while maintaining human meaning
• Demonstrating the impact of spiritual care
• The possibilities and limitations of AI in chaplain documentation

The Work of Being a Chaplain

• Learning by doing
• Boundaries and sustainable practice
• The use of self in spiritual care
• Becoming the kind of chaplain you want to be

At the Bedside

• Sitting with the dying
• The different kinds of attention
• Existential suffering
• Presence during uncertainty and agitation
• Caring for patients with limited communication

Translation

• Helping healthcare understand chaplaincy
• Helping chaplains understand healthcare
• Translating spiritual concerns into clinical language
• Translating bedside encounters into team action
• Translating research into everyday practice
• Translating Medicare requirements into meaningful care
• Making spiritual care visible and relevant
• Helping different disciplines understand one another
• Speaking the language of quality, outcomes, and healthcare leadership
• Learning to speak more than one professional language

Building a Career

• Choosing a hospice organization
• Hospice job red flags
• The biggest lessons from my first years in hospice

Building Strong Chaplaincy Programs

• What makes a healthy chaplaincy program?
• Why chaplaincy is more than a “bonus service”
• Making the financial case for chaplaincy
• Chaplaincy as risk reduction, as well as spiritual support
• Demonstrating return on investment (ROI) in hospice chaplaincy
• Increasing chaplain utilization through trust and assessment
• The hidden costs of underutilizing chaplains
• Supporting more efficient use of nursing and social work time
• The self-reinforcing cycle of low chaplain utilization
• Integrating chaplaincy into organizational strategy
• Building a culture that supports interdisciplinary chaplaincy
• What leaders should know about managing chaplaincy
• Why supervision matters in clinical chaplaincy
• How Medicare guidelines shape the work of hospice chaplains

Chaplaincy Futures

• Chaplaincy research worth reading
• Technology and the future of spiritual care
• AI, documentation, and clinical reasoning
• Where healthcare chaplaincy is headed

I’m looking forward to seeing where these conversations take us.

Which topic would you be most interested in exploring first? Or what important conversation do you think healthcare chaplaincy should be having right now?