We Can Do Better: Why Pastoral Care Visitation to Hospitals is Essential, Especially in Times of Crisis
- PDF / 571,088 Bytes
- 5 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 79 Downloads / 143 Views
We Can Do Better: Why Pastoral Care Visitation to Hospitals is Essential, Especially in Times of Crisis Daniel E. Hall1,2,3
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract From his perspective as a general surgeon, Episcopal priest and Medical Director for High Risk Populations and Outcomes at a large health-care system, the author identifies an unrecognized problem that clergy were banned from visiting parishioners in most hospitals across the country during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic—a situation that persists in many contexts. The author explains why pastoral visitation should be considered essential care—especially at a time of crisis—and encourages hospital administrators across the country to clarify policies to welcome community clergy as essential personnel, but to do so with prudent procedures that mitigate risk to the community and to the visiting clergy. Given the fact that most hospitals in this country were founded by religious organizations and still carry the imprint of that founding in their names, it would be tragic for these very same hospitals to cut patients off from their religious communities precisely at the time they need them most. Keywords Covid-19 · Pastoral care · Pastoral visitation · Quality improvement · Hospital administration
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s1094 3-020-01072-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Daniel E. Hall [email protected] 1
Center for Health Equity Research and Promotion, VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
2
Department of Surgery, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
3
Wolff Center, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, UPMC Presbyterian, Suite 1264, 200 Lothrop St, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
Journal of Religion and Health
Introduction As a practicing general surgeon, Episcopal priest and Medical Director for High Risk Populations and Outcomes across the UPMC health system in Pittsburgh, my life’s work has been dedicated to helping physicians reimagine surgical success such that patients are cared for even when our efforts to cure disease are unsuccessful (Hall 2020). So I was particularly alarmed to learn from colleagues across the country that clergy were blocked from visiting hospitalized members of their religious communities during the Covid-19 pandemic (Lehigh Valley Health Network, March 29, 2020; University of Maryland Medical System, March 20, 2020; WellSpan Health, March 21, 2020). Whether intentionally or inadvertently, hospital policies restricting visitors to “essential” staff were interpreted by many—including clergy themselves—to apply to community-based clergy. In more than one case, I know that a dying patient was denied access to their priest of long standing, with even attempts to pass a telephone to the patient’s ear for words of comfort and prayer being rebuffed by hospital staff. We can do better. Most hospitals across the USA wer
Data Loading...
