As professional chaplains we need to be in dialogue with each other about what we do, how we do it, and why we do it a certain way and how these practices benefit our patients. The ultimate goal of MyPractice is to build a consensus about what constitutes “good practice” and eventually establish “Standards of Practice” for chaplains. As with quality improvements in our institutions, this is an ongoing process in order to improve our practice.

To have a description of a practice that you use in your setting considered for inclusion here, write it up and send it to PlainViews for consideration. The Association of Professional Chaplain's Quality Commission’s Best Practice Committee will work with the Managing Editor of PlainViews to review submissions and select articles for publication. Your submission does not necessarily need to be cutting edge (although that’s okay, too). We want to identify “good practices” that could be recognized as standard practice.

PlainViews will highlight one article in the second issue of each month. Readers are invited to respond to the featured practice. Responses will be posted as they are received. This is a great opportunity to start a process that will move us forward in professional chaplaincy.

If you’d like to respond to MyPractice, please send a comment of no more than 400 words. You can use the e-form below (click on "hearing from you," link) or submit your commentary to the editor in the body of an e-mail (or as a Microsoft Word attachment) sent to Info@PlainViews.org. Please put the phrase “MyPractice” in your subject line.

We look forward to hearing from you.

'Becoming Research-Informed Chaplains' Seminar

Several years ago, George Fitchett began encouraging and advocating for chaplains to become a research-informed profession with 100% of the Association of Professional Chaplains’ membership valuing research and becoming research literate by 2012. He called upon chaplains to learn what research relevant to chaplains is being published and where, to learn how to understand research papers, and to read several articles a year and learn the implications of the research for our ministries.[1]

Not unlike other chaplaincy departments, there has been some aversion to reading research, especially quantitative research, within our department. Nonetheless, we took seriously Fitchett’s vision/charge and embarked upon a method of becoming better consumers of research. Initially each year every chaplain was required to read three research papers of the individual chaplain’s choosing that were approved by the department manager as part of annual competencies. Subsequently, we (six chaplains) have begun reading the same papers and three times per year (during selected months of an on-going monthly educational seminar) we have an hour-long discussion about a selected paper. Generally the manager selects the papers based upon research that has come to the manager’s attention or through utilizing the ACPE Research Network webpage (http://www.acperesearch.net/). Occasionally one of the other chaplains will suggest a paper about which there is interest.

Often a research summary outline that Fitchett developed provides some guidance to our discussion. This includes themes such as:

• Study aims or research questions or hypotheses

• Background for the study (review of the literature)

• Information about the research methods (e.g., study design, sample, measures, how the data was analyzed)

• Results of the study

• Summary of the investigators’ discussion of the following:

o Integration with other research
o Limitations of the study
o Implications of the study for further research
o Clinical implications of the study

• Critical Evaluation: Strengths and weaknesses of this research; what else would be helpful to know

• Spiritual/Religious Care Application: Implications of the research for ministry, if any

The last two themes especially generate energized conversation.

Our initial seminar was an overview of religion and health research. Subsequently we have read and discussed articles about physicians engaging their patients about spirituality/religion (S/R) issues, nurses and S/R care, post-traumatic transformation, prayer (which allowed us to become informed about an article occasionally discussed by the public), and religious distress. Beginning the second year, we invited a biostatistician to join us since we are novices regarding statistics. She talks about the statistics used in the study and offers a critical perspective on the research methods.

We have now completed two years of this group process. Our chaplains are less apprehensive about research and are a little more knowledgeable about the statistics, have learned about interesting and relevant studies, and are impacted by the insights from the articles. For example, the articles have informed us in our efforts to better screen patients for S/R issues, provided additional research-informed language for framing issues, and influenced our planning for multi-disciplinary staff education efforts. A secondary gain has been increased team building through the time and discussions together. That we only meet three times a year is both a strength and weakness of our method, i.e., three articles a year is manageable but only three times a year limits retention of some of the learning, especially in terms of statistics and research methods. But based on our experience, I would advocate for research-informed chaplains (i.e., informed rather than expert or scholar) being an achievable standard of practice for chaplains with our method as one way to address that standard.

Footnote:

[1] Fitchett, George. (2002). “Health Care Chaplaincy as a Research-Informed Profession: How We Get There.” Journal of Health Care Chaplaincy. 12(1/2):67-72.

Send your comments about MyPractice to info@PlainViews.org.