Improving access to palliative care clinical pastoral education

Abstract

Palliative care is interprofessional care for seriously ill people. Many clergy, religious leaders, and hospice and palliative care chaplains of color and minority religious backgrounds desire clinical palliative care education. This manuscript presents findings from a three-year quality improvement project which included the development of a palliative care specialty ACPE: The Standard for Spiritual Care and Education (ACPE) accredited program at an academic medical center. The program was designed to improve spiritual care provision in palliative care at the institution and to facilitate the participation of clergy and spiritual leaders of color and minority religious groups. Forty-six students participated in 53 400-h clinical pastoral education units. Strategies from medical education literature were employed to address obstacles to CPE participation including a racially and religiously diverse CPE advisory group, financial assistance, flexible learning (e.g. hybrid, asynchronous), and clinical placement agreements at places of employment. Upon completion of the program students provided written feedback, participated in a structured exit interview and completed a survey. Data were reviewed for common themes and results report student perceptions about the strategies utilized.

Keywords:

• Chaplaincy
• clinical pastoral education
• DEI
• palliative care
• spiritual care

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the CPE students who participated in this pilot as well as the CPE Professional Advisory Group at UC San Diego Health, led by Layah Steinberg and Bill Mitchell. We appreciate the guidance provided by Gary Buckholz, Betty Ferrell, John Gillman, and Dirk Labuschagne in shaping this inquiry. The groundbreaking work of Rabbi Mychal Springer and the Center for Pastoral Education at the Jewish Theological Seminary in CPE for underrepresented populations was an inspiration for this project. Staff and leaders at ACPE (Marc Medwed and John Roch) and APC (Patricia Applehans, Denise Hess, Anna Lee Hisey Pierson) provided access to statistics and data. We are additionally grateful to the Step Family Foundation for their generous support of our Inpatient Palliative Unit, which is a rotation site for our CPE students.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a grant from the Cambia Health Foundation.