Hospital Pastoral Services departments

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On November 7th, 2006, a group of individuals gathered to discuss the challenges in managing hospital Pastoral Services departments. Here are several of the issues discussed during the call. Please use the "discussion" tab to submit your own thoughts on these topics or suggest solutions or resources. Alternatively, if you feel comfortable editing this page you're welcome to do so!

1 Notifying Churches of Patient Admission
2 Volunteers and Interns
3 Managing expenses and tracking workloads
4 One-person Pastoral Services Departments
5 Measuring Quality and Patient Satisfaction

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Notifying Churches of Patient Admission

How do you gather church information from patients and contact the institution - and should you?

Although Registration personnel ask about church membership, the information is often incorrect. Some facilities address this by having a Pastoral Volunteer go to the patient's room after admission, identify himself as a Pastoral Volunteer, and ask if there is a church that should be notified.
Some individuals may not want their churches to be notified. This is not only for privacy reasons but because as churches often publish hospitalization in their newsletters it indicates an empty house.
Some facilities will only answer inquiries from churches as opposed to contacting the churches, in observance of HIPAA.
Some facilities have daily email lists and notify churches in that way.

How does your facility ensure that churches are notified in a timely manner, while both observing the privacy when required AND complying with HIPAA? Use the "discussion" tab to add comments, solutions, or additional questions.

Upon admission, our hospital has the patient or surrogate decision-maker sign and date a pre-printed request to the chaplaincy for the congregation or religious leader to be identified and contacted that the patient has been admitted.

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Volunteers and Interns

One primary challenge of Hospital Pastoral Services departments is managing Volunteers - attracting, retaining, and training them. Many facilites report that volunteers and particularly CPE Interns raise Patient Satisfaciton scores.

Challenge: Some people report that they don't have a real problem recruiting volunteers, but the HIPAA requirements are so rigorous that it causes a retention drain. Do you experience that at your facility? Do you have any solutions to offer for this problem?
Challenge: How do you recruit qualified volunteers?

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Managing expenses and tracking workloads

Challenge: How do you measure 'production' at a hospital for Pastoral Services?

Chaplain Bruce Rippe of McKee Medical Center highly reccomends the following article entitled "How Much Does It Cost to Do What We Do?" by Dean V. Marek. It was published in the Autumn/Winter issue (Vol. 21, Number 2) of Chaplaincy Today, the journal of The Association of Professional Chaplains. To order a copy of this volume, download the order form from here: http://www.professionalchaplains.org/uploadedFiles/pdf/2005_Resource_Order_Form.pdf

To track visits in a more realistic way, Virginia Carreiro, M.A.P.Min. noted that at a previous hospital she classified Pastoral visits into three categories: Low, Medium, and High intensity visits.

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One-person Pastoral Services Departments

The challenges of being a one-person department are enormous and in a hospital of any but the smallest size, one individual cannot possibly attend all meetings, all codes, all deaths, manage volunteers and still do patient rounding.

Challenge: How can you prove the value of Pastoral Services to hospital Senior Leadership and thereby have requests for additional staff honored?

Idea: Anecdotal evidence does show that additional CPE interns do raise Patient Satisfaction scores. Gathering of this evidence will help support a case for more staff.
Resource: There is a Yahoo group entitled "One Person Department Chaplains" that comes highly recommended.

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Measuring Quality and Patient Satisfaction

Challenge: How do you measure quality and patient satisfaction?
Many facilities use Press-Ganey as an official measure, but very few are happy with this indicator, believing it to be unrealistic and based on "cramming in as many visits as one can" during the work day.