As a physician, Robert Klitzman is acutely aware that while clinicians are well-trained to handle the physical needs of hospitalized patients, they are often unequipped to handle the more existential challenges that so many of these patients face. This led Klitzman, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, to research and write a book on hospital chaplains.
Klitzman joins today’s First Opinion Podcast along with Molly O’Neil Frank, the staff palliative care chaplain at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center who is both a board certified chaplain as well as an ordained Episcopal minister.
About 75% of U.S. hospitals use chaplains, who are either employed by the health care center or are spiritual leaders from the local community. While the roles they play can vary, both Klitzman and O’Neil Frank believe chaplains are a critical part of patient care. Perhaps counterintuitively, they say, chaplains’ roles have become even more important as religious affiliation has declined in the country. Patients facing intense questions and emotions around illness and death may not have existing spiritual mentors to speak with.
The duties of a chaplain can be broad. O’Neil Frank says her duties include everything from simply praying with patients or listening to them to performing blessings, marriages, baptisms, or end-of-life rituals. Chaplains also often act as mediators between patients, their families, and their medical teams, and can support staff during times of high stress. Chaplains, O’Neil Frank says, have “deep training to meet people where they are spiritually at the hospital.”
For the full conversation, listen to this episode of the podcast. You can read more about the topic in Klitzman’s essay, “How chaplains can help the fractured U.S. health care system.“
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