Through a rich variety of case studies, this book provides insight into the patient's needs and the chaplain's perspective, as well as discussions of spiritual assessments and spiritual care interventions. Case studies such as a request to baptise a child complicated due to his admission for 'psychiatric reasons', as well as work with military veterans, such as a female transgender veteran who has been alienated from her faith, show the breadth and complexity of work that chaplains undertake daily. Each section also includes critical responses to the case studies presented from a chaplain and related healthcare professional. This book will enable chaplains to critically reflect on the spiritual care they provide, and provide an informed perspective for healthcare professionals and others involved in chaplaincy services.

Structure your ministry to start with patients’needs, hopes, and resources and to be clear what difference your ministry can make!Hospital chaplains value who they are and what they do as contributions to patients’and families’healing and well-being. And they are continually stretching to enhance their ministries. Hospital administrators and other professionals on the care teams, however, often need help to grasp those same values in outcome oriented, observable, documentable, changes-for-the-better terms. The Discipline for Pastoral Care Giving: Foundations for Outcome Oriented Chaplaincy offers a powerful new paradigm for enhancing supportive, effective spiritual care for patients and families as well as communicating substantive outcomes to leaders and clinicians alike. This is all the more important in these times when every possible resource must be well used for the good of our patients and their families.By evaluating the pastoral care you offer, you can become more aware of the discrete skills you exercise in the assessment, planning, intervention, and reflection process. Such evaluation efforts highlight the discrete differences excellent spiritual care makes. This can help you track contributions you are making in terms of the patient's healing and well-being. Having a sound, replicable way to make the process more conscious also helps you communicate your assessment, strategies, and contributions more clearly to other care team members. Furthermore, consistently using The Discipline over time will enable you to discover patterns of spiritual dynamics in how people live with different health care challenges in their lives. These patterns translate into valuable insights as your care for others.The process discussed in The Discipline for Pastoral Care Giving calls on the chaplain to: identify the patient's spiritual needs, hopes, and resources construct a patient profile through identifying the individual's sense of the holy, sense of meaning, sense of hope, and sense of community design the desired outcome(s) you hope your care will contribute--for example, a person who has suffered a spinal cord injury integrates the effects of their injury in their sense of identity and meaning, a person living with cystic fibrosis healthfully grieves the loss of others in the CF community, a patient 'disabled’by the absence of her support community regains use of her personal resources for coping and self-care develop and share a plan for the patient's spiritual care choose interventions (which may range from facilitating a life review, to compassionate confrontation, to reading Scripture, to active listening, to arranging a family care conference) measure outcomes, identifying and communicating the difference your care has made in terms of the patient's healing and well-beingThe Discipline for Pastoral Care Giving offers case studies, personal experiences, helpful figures and charts, and suggestions for dealing with patients experiencing unique, complex health care challenges, including adults living with cystic fibrosis and violent victims of violence. The wise advice and practical suggestions in this book will help you recognize and document the solid value of your hospital ministry.

Wendy Cadge and Shelly Rambo demonstrate the urgent need, highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic, to position the long history and practice of chaplaincy within the rapidly changing landscape of American religion and spirituality. This book provides a much-needed road map for training and renewing chaplains across a professional continuum that spans major sectors of American society, including hospitals, prisons, universities, the military, and nursing homes. Written by a team of multidisciplinary experts and drawing on ongoing research at the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab at Brandeis University, Chaplaincy and Spiritual Care in the Twenty-First Century identifies three central competencies—individual, organizational, and meaning-making—that all chaplains must have, and it provides the resources for building those skills. Featuring profiles of working chaplains, the book positions intersectional issues of religious diversity, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and other markers of identity as central to the future of chaplaincy as a profession.

A collection of comprehensive case studies demonstrating the important role of the chaplain in assisting patients with life limiting illnesses in their medical decision-making. The contributors are from a diverse range of settings and feature a variety of religious traditions to show the full range of chaplains' approaches.

The recent production of case studies in chaplaincy care combines the narrative nature of chaplaincy with the rigors of research demanded in contemporary care settings. The contributions in this volume from both practitioners and academic researchers join reflections on the challenges and promises of case study research in chaplaincy care with the results of specific case studies. Based on reflections on methodology and professionalization in chaplaincy, the volume hopes to contribute to answering the question of how and why chaplaincy works. As such, the book aims for a wide readership of scholars, chaplains and policy makers. Learning from Case Studies originated from the first international conference on case study research in chaplaincy care that was held in Amsterdam in 2019. “This book is a valuable Western European contribution to the international emerging fi eld of chaplaincy research.” Prof. dr. Anne Vandenhoeck, Director of the European Research, Institute for Chaplains in Health Care, KU Leuven, Belgium “This significant book represents a step-change in research into effective chaplaincy practice. Building on previous work, led by Fitchett and Nolan, chaplains and academics offer new case studies, but also develop this critically reflective approach together. Chapters on methodology show how case studies, especially when analysed comparatively, provide important evidence for how and why chaplaincy works.” Rev. Dr. Andrew Todd, Director of the Professional Doctorate in Practical Theology, Anglia Ruskin University, England “At the heart of chaplaincy are stories, and this collection combines reverence for the stories themselves alongside a critical exploration of how these cases engage with the important issues of our times: what it means to be a profession and to have a professional identity and the need for research that recognises the integral relationship between practice and evidence. This book provides a significant contribution to the current conversations in the spiritual care field.” Cheryl Holmes, OAM, CEO Spiritual Health Association, Australia

This textbook untangles the complicated ethical dilemmas that arise during the day-to-day work of healthcare chaplaincy, and offers a sturdy but flexible framework which chaplains can use to reflect on their own practice. Tackling essential issues such as consent, life support, abortion, beginning and end of life and human dignity, it enables chaplains to tease out the ethical implications of situations they encounter, to educate themselves on relevant legal matters and to engage with different ethical viewpoints. The book combines case studies of familiar scenarios with thorough information on legal matters, while providing ample opportunity for workplace reflection and offering guidance as to how chaplains can best support patients and their families while preserving their own integrity and well-being. Clear, sensitive and user-friendly, this will be an indispensable resource for healthcare chaplains and all healthcare professionals interested in spiritual care.

Anton T. Boisen, who started the clinical pastoral movement, believed that carefully reviewing cases of actual patients is the only effective way to train chaplains. But what distinguishes clinical chaplaincy in the tradition of Boisen from the work of other religious or spiritual practitioners who might lay claim to the title "chaplain"? Responding to a second volume of cases published by George Fitchett and Steve Nolan, the distinguished CPE supervisor Raymond J. Lawrence provides alternative approaches to each case, ones that penetrate more deeply into the heart and soul of the patient, offering a more compassionate and meaningful sort of chaplaincy.Like its predecessor volume, Nine Clinical Cases: The Soul of Pastoral Care & Counseling, this book is intended for those who want to move from a service delivery and "prayer warrior" form of chaplaincy to one that is more psychodynamically based. It is also intended for those who train chaplains and aspire to doing so better.