Rev. Michael Guthrie on quantifying a professional practice that has at its roots “unquantifiable” experiences

Reflections on Research from A Newly Certified APC Member

The March 2008 Association of Professional Chaplains conference was my first of hopefully many conferences with the APC. The experience was everything I anticipated and more; in fact, much more as I soon discovered. While attending one workshop in particular I experienced a shift in perspective. The Monday afternoon session entitled, Professional Chaplains and Healthcare Quality Improvement: A Research Collaborative caught my eye. I thought this would be a wonderful opportunity to see how others are doing research as it relates to chaplaincy. I hoped to bring back a great model that could suit the needs of the department at the Level One Trauma Center where I am on staff.

Through the course of the workshop I found myself getting a bit impatient. I was waiting for the panel to get to the “how to” and tell me what I needed in order to do research. Is that not why I attend the workshops at these conferences? In general, we go to the workshops of conferences with the intent to learn what others are doing and apply it to our context. More times than not, we are looking for that “magic remedy” that will change what we do. As a new member to the collegial brotherhood and sisterhood of the APC, I admit this was my “world view” for the 2008 conference.

During the Q and A period, I listened to the other participants ask similar questions to what I expected. How did you go about your research? What is the point of research anyway? As I listened to these questions and the panel’s responses, I had an “aha” moment. In the language of our religious traditions I had a conversion experience; a transcendent moment. The panel did not respond with a simple, “here is how you do it” process. Instead, they presented us with a challenge. As professional chaplains, what are we doing to join our voice with the other disciplines in a clinical setting to validate our services through concrete outcomes? In other words, how are we speaking the language of the medical profession and administration that we do more than simply glorified “hand holding” in the midst of crisis?

Along with that challenge came “the call” to enter into a dialogue with each other as a profession to develop some outcome-oriented “standards of practice” with verifiable data collected through research. Following the path of the great Father of Faith, Abraham, as we receive the call we step out in faith, leaving the familiar “land” of practice and step out into a new frontier, with the promise of finding a new place to settle. A place that allows us to set the foundation for the future of our professional practice that will transform the lives of people, institutions and systems. While there are potentially as many responses to “the call” as there are persons receiving it, we must answer the question, “How do we address the tension between quantifying a professional practice that has at its roots “unquantifiable” experiences?”

Where should we start? This is sometimes the most difficult place to begin. I would like to offer two suggestions. First, is to develop forums for dialogue. These will provide opportunities to intentionally look at what quality professional chaplaincy can look like. One readily accessible location of such a forum is the internet. Such sites to visit are: The TalkBack section of PlainViews or under the Pastoral Practice forum on the Association of Professional Chaplains’ Web site at http://professionalchaplains.org/discussionForum/. These forums offer a starting place to answer “the call” for dialogue, as well as allow us to approach some solutions for the challenge of defining quality pastoral practice in the healthcare setting. Another forum, following in the footsteps of a group of North Georgia hospitals, is face-to-face meetings between chaplains across a region. The article “A Collegial Process for Developing Better Practices” in the 2008 Spring/Summer addition of Chaplaincy Today provides a fantastic model to follow. The “North Georgia Project” was a collaborative effort of chaplaincy departments across eight hospitals plotting their departmental practices. The goal was to help one chaplain respond to the vice president’s request to develop some “benchmarks” for chaplaincy. The result was a grid of “better practices” that helped all the departments involved in the process. The authors even mention their hopes to have this process spread throughout the country so as to get closer to establishing standards of practice within professional chaplaincy in healthcare.

A second suggestion comes from the wonderful opportunity offered at the Spiritual Care Summit being held the first week of February 2009. This week affords a unique gathering of six pastoral care, counseling, and education associations to come together in one location to discuss this topic. If enough people were interested, a designated lunch meeting could be set up for an initial face-to-face discussion of ways to answer “the call.” I imagine we will all get the opportunity to connect with some great colleagues in the process.

From their study, “Healthcare Chaplains and Quality: Managing Tensions and Paradoxes” the panel from Professional Chaplains and Healthcare Quality Improvement: A Research Collaborative, put words to the tension I believe many of us experience. A tension that exists between the intrinsic value of spiritual care and the extrinsic value of that care to the institution where we are located. Peter Senge, in The Fifth Discipline, describes the concept of creative tension, the space that exists between our vision of what we would hope to achieve and the constraints of our current reality. The tension we experience is very much of this sort: the space between the “unmeasurables” of spiritual care in the context of an institution that measures everything justifiable by the value of the numbers it produces. We can either approach the call to change this tension as a “threat to our survival,” living out of an anxiety that we will in some way lose the essence of what is spiritual. Or, we can strive to gain “mastery” of this tension and experience, “a fundamental shift in our whole posture toward” the professional practice of pastoral care; a “mastery” that will prove to transform who we are and how we serve the people and institutions at which we find ourselves. In the words of Franklin D. Roosevelt, “The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong and active faith.”

To read more about Professional Chaplains and Healthcare Quality Improvement: A Research Collaborative go to: http://www.thehastingscenter.org/research/professional-chaplains-quality-improvement-health-care.asp

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