The Roles of Chaplains in Medical Decision-Making

There are various occasions and situations that warrants decision-making on patients/care recipients such as:-

1.     When surgery is to be performed on a patient.

2.     When critical issues that require urgent decisions to be made by patients.

3.     When patients are to be given suicide assistance (assisted suicide).

4.     In organ donation.

5.     When patients are diagnosed to have developed terminal disease or illness. The kind of medication and treatments to be given to such patients.

6.     In cases of blood transfusion.

7.     For people who have gotten to end of life stage.

In developed nations like US and UK, medical practice and services is a collaborative one with interdisciplinary professionals in which all healthcare professionals are a team including hospital chaplains, palliative chaplains and hospice chaplains as well.

Whenever medical decisions are to be taken, medical directors, specialists, chief pharmacists, chief nursing director or matron, head of social workers and chaplaincy directors who are members of the hospital board or committee will usually meet to take needed and vital medical decisions on patients each time such decision becomes necessary.

This kind of collective medical decision making can only be expected in well-structured and organized teaching hospitals, medical centers or specialist hospitals etc. where there are presence of various professional healthcare team working for the care and healing of patients.

It is worthy of note that even in developed nations  that there are some hospitals and healthcare centers that do not follow this procedures while many of them employ this collective participative medical decision making which include interdisciplinary professionals as stated above.

However, in the continent of Africa, with special reference to Nigeria as a nation and people, chaplains are not even in the healthcare conversations which calls for advocacy for the inclusion of trained and certified professional healthcare chaplains in the healthcare development system.

But for the future chaplaincy leaders in this part of the world, they need to create needed space for chaplaincy profession, practice and service delivery, the professional practitioners in the healthcare sector as well as other sectors of the economy.

This advocacy now brings me to the point of enumerating what roles chaplains should play in healthcare sector:-

1.     Inclusive and qualitative sound education that will enable chaplains enter into decision and conversations with other healthcare professionals in the care and healing of patients.

2.     Inclusive and qualitative theological education and CPE or CCPE which will give chaplains the needed competences and professional confidence in chaplaincy practice and service delivery.

3.     Chaplaincy leadership creating needed spaces for the profession, its practice and the professional practitioners to enable them be integrated very well into the system.

4.     Chaplains must make professional chaplaincy practice, evidence based clinical chaplaincy practice a priority with proper documentation of conversation with patients for use by interdisciplinary professionals in the healthcare sector.

5.     Chaplains must endeavor not to limit their practices and operations to religious rituals and practices only. They must of necessity come to the understanding of the fact that all human beings have spiritual components and spirituality belongs to the religious people as well as people of no religion.

6.     Chaplains are understood to be the bridge between medicine and spirituality and must educate themselves very well to remain in such position with evidence based practice that will engender them to other healthcare professionals.

7.     Also chaplains are bridge between hospital management and the patients and their families and should endeavor to improve themselves adequately to maintain such position effectively.

8.     Chaplains are expected to advocate social justice and moral issues.

9.     Chaplains are expected to represent the organizations they work for in the public rightly.

10.                        Chaplains are expected to let the public know their values to enable the public respect accord them the needed recognition.

11.                        Chaplain must to make known what they do in the care of patients and the value of their services.

12.                        Chaplains must of necessity engage in literature writing and publishing that will make their activities and specialties known to the general public so as to be engaged by them.

13.                        Chaplains must learn to engage in chaplaincy researches and activities themselves not leaving it to other interdisciplinary professionals who will not project the profession rightly nor the practitioners accurately.

In conclusion, I wish to state at this juncture, that students and trainee chaplains on intern will have to be instruments of integration if they serve competently in any healthcare sector they were sent to meet the demands of the sector and the patients.

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Chap. David Mike-Jacobs CPC, CPST, BCC.

Professor of Anthropology, Certified Chaplaincy Educator & Trainer.

Blog: thechaplain1.blogspot.com

22^nd Oct, AD2022