Role of board-certified chaplains B

Role of board-certified chaplains Board-certified professional chaplains are uniquely trained to be the spiritual care specialists within health care. Most patients, families, and health care professionals remain unaware of the extensive training and certification process for professional chaplaincy, often mistakenly assuming that chaplains are ministers or faith leaders who simply like to visit sick people but have little if any additional training beyond their studies to become a faith leader. This may have been the case a generation or two ago, but it is no longer the case today. Board-certified chaplaincy is a career that requires intensive post-graduate training and a clinical residency, akin in many ways to the graduate medical education physicians experience after medical school in their residency.In order to be eligible for board certification, a chaplain must complete a Master’s degree in a content area relevant to professional chaplaincy. In addition, a chaplain must also have substantial and in-depth clinical training. Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) is one of the most popular clinical chaplaincy training paradigms. Within CPE, in addition to didactic sessions for gaining a knowledge base and skill set for chaplaincy, chaplains-in-training provide spiritual care for patients, families, and staff in order to gain clinical experience. The chaplain then returns to his or her peer group to analyze what worked well, what did not, and why; this informs the chaplain’s clinical interactions moving forward. This action-reflection-action model allows for chaplains to learn insights into their own spiritual care tendencies and to gain awareness of how their tendencies impact the patient, family, or staff with whom they work [120].