Overview
The Spiritual Care Department provides spiritual support and resources to patients and families, honoring each person’s faith traditions and spiritual perspectives.
Spiritual care is available to all patients and families at Rady Children’s. The chaplain helps integrate spiritual support and understanding into the healthcare setting and provides spiritual care in the context of the family’s spiritual perspective and religious traditions. Chaplains routinely work with families from a variety of religious traditions, as well as with families who do not have a spiritual tradition or practice.
Spiritual concerns are very common when a child is hospitalized, whether or not a family has had a spiritual practice. For this reason, we provide services to assist patients and families in adjusting to and coping with the illness or injury they are facing. Chaplains are trained in faith development and provide spiritual care to pediatric patients with respect to the patient’s developmental level.
Our programs include:
Our services include:
- Spiritual assessment of families and patients (with attention to the patient’s developmental needs)
- Spiritual crisis intervention
- Spiritual counsel for spiritual support, concerns, distress and guidance
- Clinical spiritual care to assist the patient and family adjust to and cope with the child’s illness, injury and hospitalization
- Access to specific clergy for families, (priest, rabbi, imam, etc.)
- Facilitation of the family’s clergy or religious community to provide support for the family
- Pastoral consultation for bioethical questions that family and the healthcare team are facing
- Consultation for the healthcare team about spiritual, religious and cultural issues in patient care
- Religious rites, such as prayer, baptism, blessing, communion and anointing
- Spiritual support for patients and their families when a patient is dying
- Pastoral counseling for grief issues, particularly spiritual issues related to the death of a child
- Bereavement support around the time of and at the time of death
- Officiation at funerals and memorial services
- Inspirational literature
- Spiritual care for members of the healthcare team
- Debriefing the healthcare team after a crisis or to assist in adjusting with job demands
In the News
Hospital Chaplains Steward Spiritual Healing for End-of-life Patients and Their Families, The San Diego Union-Tribune, features Reverend Ryan Sey, M.Div