Ethical Grounding for a Profession of Hospital Chaplaincy‪.‬

Hospital chaplains do not have a monopoly on the spiritual care of patients, just as teachers do not have a monopoly on teaching. Spiritual care of the ill and dying--compassionate and thoughtful attention to a patient's explanations of suffering, yearnings for transcendence, constructions of meaning, expressions of faith or loss of it, reliance on prayer or ritual, bafflement, fear, hope, or any of the many other possible manifestations of spirituality in crisis--has long been within the domain of good nurses and good doctors. Nevertheless, spiritual care is the primary and arguably the sole focus of chaplains' work, and just as we recognize a teaching profession even though "nonprofessionals" also teach, we can justifiably recognize hospital chaplaincy as a profession that specializes in spiritual care of patients--and then turn to the task of specifying the defining criteria for the profession, including its ethical grounding and governing tenets. As chaplains acknowledge, physicians, nurses, and other clinicians may--and often do--offer patients "spiritual" care that attends to the deep questions of meaning, purpose, and connection to others that arise during a serious illness. (Although some patients may frame their questions in religious terms, it should be noted that "religious" is not a synonym for "spiritual," but rather describes a sizable subset within the category of the spiritual.) The difference between chaplains and other clinicians is that chaplains are specialists in spiritual care; it is what they do, rather than part of what they do.