Legacy MattersHospice Chaplains Take Up Bedside Counseling
The encounter with a chaplain can be profound and spiritual, and sometimes religious in a traditional way. More and more, though, ministering to the terminally ill in hospice care is likely to be nonsectarian, or even secular.
In the quarter-century since Medicare and some private insurers began picking up the bill for hospice care, it has become a common recourse for the terminally ill. With doctors, nurses, social workers and ample supplies of pain medication dispatched to their homes or nursing facilities in the final weeks and months, about 1.3 million Americans died last year in hospice care.
Spiritual counseling has always been an optional part of the service. But recently, the proportion of patients choosing to receive it, and the number of new chaplains entering the field to meet the need, have risen sharply.
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In the hospice idiom, the job of the chaplain is to make dying easier. In a way that perhaps only Americans would understand, some chaplains refer to what they do as fostering a more “successful” experience — by whatever definition of success can be negotiated in the final hours between a dying person and a compassionate stranger.
Health care and religion experts cite several reasons for the new pastoral model: a growing consensus in the medical world that spiritual care comforts terminal patients; the shortage of clergy, especially priests; a decline in traditional worship; and the apparently unchanged need most people have near the end of life to make sense of existence.