Inside Duke Medicine

Hospital chaplains reach across faiths

By Erin Pratt

On a sunny October afternoon, Duke University Hospital chaplain Deborah Morgan walked from her office in Baker House to Duke North, enjoying the seasonal atmosphere and preparing to visit with patients and their families.

In her eight years as a chaplain here, Rev. Morgan, a Duke Divinity School graduate and board-certified chaplain, has come to understand that patients come to the hospital and Emergency Department with their unique situations and backgrounds.

“Each patient’s health is different and requires specialized care. The spiritual needs and beliefs of each patient are also different and cared for at Duke,” Morgan said.

Morgan is one of the three chaplains in the DUH Pastoral Services Department. They care for patients’ spiritual needs with the same level of personalized care that Duke doctors, nurses, and staff provide for patients, said director Jim Rawlings.

“We support patients and staff with resources from their own faith perspective during a crisis in their lives,” said Rawlings. “We help them reconcile their situation with their life.”

The three chaplains at Duke, along with adjunct chaplains in the community, are able to provide spiritual care for patients of any faith background.

Pausing before she walked into her assigned unit, Morgan checked in with the nurse to see how she and the patients were doing. She then entered the room and greeted the couple, a Catholic husband, and his Baptist wife.

Morgan, a Methodist, had been ministering to the couple for several weeks as the husband recovered from a trauma injury and the wife remained at this side.

Morgan visited the couple weekly, offering a friendly ear to listen and remembrance in prayer. Like other DUH chaplains, she does not attempt to alter someone’s faith or persuade them toward one faith background.  She instead offers to help make sure their individual spiritual needs are met during their stay at the hospital.

“I tell people that I can be their pastor while they are here,” Morgan said. “I let them decide how much time we spend together.”

She checks in with the patients and their families weekly and coordinates initial visits with the nurses in her assigned units.

“I say prayers with them and for them, we read scripture together, and talk. Most importantly, I let them know they have a friendly face willing to advocate for them.”

After visiting with the couple, Morgan asked the patient “would you like for me to pray with you here or say a prayer back in my office for you?”

“I like to propose prayer in a way that the patient doesn’t feel obligated,” Morgan said.

Morgan reached out and joined hands with the couple to create a prayer circle. At the husband’s request, they recited the Lord’s Prayer together.

After praying with the patient, Morgan sat alone with the wife for nearly an hour, listening as she talked about the difficulty of being away from their family and home during her husband’s recovery. The wife shared, with Morgan, her concerns and hopes for her husband with both tears and joy.

At the end of their visit, the wife walked away with a smile on her face. She said it helped having someone here at Duke to talk through her worries about her husband’s recovery and future.

The experience was helping the couple grow stronger in their individual faiths, the wife said.

Duke researchers have encountered similar stories.

Over the last 20 years, Harold G. Koenig, M.D., professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, and colleagues at Duke and the Durham VA, have studied the commonality of religious coping among patients who are sick and in the hospital.

“We consistently find that religious coping is very common among sick people,” Koenig said. “Our research shows that 90 percent of the patients at Duke are using religion to cope at least on a moderate level. Of those patients, 40 percent view religious coping as the most important factor in coping with their illness.”

Koenig has also published three studies, two in the American Journal of Psychiatry, that report religiously involved medical patients are less likely to become depressed and more likely to recover if they do become depressed than less religiously involved people.

“Religion is a prevalent way of coping with illness,” Koenig said. “So, it makes sense that Duke chaplains help speed the recovery process for patients.”

“Based on our other research findings, I would expect that hospital chaplains help people cope better and reduce depression, recovery time, and length of stay at the hospital,” he said.

The history

Pastoral services have been offered at Duke University Hospital since 1956, when the first DUH chaplain, P. Wesley Aitken, was appointed. While its mission, to provide pastoral care to people who are in a crisis, has not changed; its services have expanded.

Pastoral Services has four main programs: providing ministry to patients, families, and staff; the clinical pastoral education program; offering bereavement services to patients and staff; and the Partners in Caring community outreach program.

The department and chaplains also provide weekly care to Duke clinical staff. The chaplains check in with the nurses and staff while visiting their assigned units to see how they can help them.

“We really support our nurses and clinicians,” Rawlings said. “They’re the ones in the trenches everyday.”

To improve their programs, Pastoral Services recently created a program with 24 active volunteers into the services offered by its three chaplains, student interns from the Duke Divinity School and adjunct chaplains of various faith backgrounds.

During the first year of the volunteer program, the volunteers alone made 1,500 visits to patients. The department as a whole made 12,677 patient/family visits in 2007.

Bill Crittenden, a retired hospital chaplain with 18 years of service, volunteers every week in Duke’s Emergency Department.

“I didn’t know what the need would be when I first came to Duke, but I knew I wanted to help the hospital and the people they serve,” he said.

While Crittenden is a former chaplain, all volunteers are not, but they do participate in a training process at Duke.

“I think volunteers are a great compliment to the care provided by the chaplains and students in training,” Morgan said. “They can’t provide it all, but they help us reach more people, more often.”

Pastoral care is offered at DUH, Durham Regional Hospital and Duke Raleigh.  See below for more details.

Find more information about the services offered at DUH here.

For information about spiritual care at Duke Raleigh Hospital, contact Adrian Dixon at 954-3268 or visit this link. 

For Durham Regional Hospital information, contact the director of Pastoral Services at 470-8313.

The Pastoral Services Department has set aside this week, October 13-19, to celebrate National Pastoral Services Week. An overview of the department and its staff will be on display in the Duke North hallway (coming from the Searle Center to Duke North.)

Read about Pastoral Services’ 50th anniversary in a previous Inside Duke Medicine article.