Carol McAninch-Pritz on a win-win CPE model

Moving into Bi-lingual and Bi-cultural CPE

Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center is a large inner-city hospital in Phoenix, Arizona. Our community has a large concentration of people for whom Spanish is their first and sometimes only language. Currently, the patient population at BGSMC is between thirty-five and forty percent Hispanic. In the Emergency Department, that percentage rises to fifty-five or sixty percent. It is a significant challenge to provide adequate spiritual care in the midst of crises when our chaplains and Clinical Pastoral Education students are primarily English speaking.

In 1997, during a self-study for accreditation with the Association for Clinical Pastoral Education, we discovered that our student population was five percent Hispanic but the patient population was about thirty percent Hispanic. After exploring the reasons for the discrepancy, we discovered that most Hispanics, especially those not born in the United States, were unaware that hospital chaplaincy was a potential career. In an attempt to raise the awareness about this ministry, we requested and received a grant from Banner Health to fund scholarships and stipends for six students to enter an extended unit of CPE. We recruited students by sponsoring an invitational dinner for Hispanic denominational leaders, interested pastors and lay people. Six students entered our inaugural bi-lingual CPE program in 2000.

Early in the development of the bi-lingual CPE program, we realized that the program would have to do more than just offer the opportunity to do CPE. In consultation with Hispanic leaders, we discovered the need to develop the group through relationship-building activities before students could feel comfortable offering critique to each other. The students planned several social events and regular pot-luck lunches as a way to build their sense of community. Students found learning easier when critique was depersonalized and when their struggles with ministry were normalized. They were able to develop pastoral skills when they realized that the group’s intention was to help them find better ways to provide ministry. Students could learn without feeling as if they had to compete with each other and could maintain their social unit. We also found that some of the teaching styles we learned from the Hispanic students improved supervision with non-Hispanic students.

After the initial pilot program, we secured a three-year grant from a community agency to continue the program and eventually were able to support the bi-lingual CPE program from the hospital budget. Bi-lingual CPE is now seven years old at BGSMC. To date, thirty-five students have taken at least one unit of bi-lingual CPE and five have entered residency after an initial unit in the bi-lingual program.

Our hospital recently hired our first Hispanic chaplain as a direct result of the bi-lingual program. We now have a worship service in Spanish every Sunday evening and offer services in Spanish for special religious holidays. Patients now have the opportunity to receive spiritual care in their primary language without having to go through an interpreter. Our staff has become more culturally sensitive; and our English-only staff is learning more Spanish and can assist our Spanish-speaking patients in a limited way. Bi-lingual CPE is a great win-win blessing.

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