Teaching Clinical Ethics for Professional Chaplaincy Competency: A Process Improvement Study

Abstract: An inescapable part of being human is the experience of spiritual and moral distress. Spiritual care practitioners are tasked with providing care to people at spiritually and morally vulnerable moments throughout the health care setting: patients, friends and family members, and health care providers. As the practice of professional spiritual care and chaplaincy sharpens its focus on evidence-based assessments and interventions, professional associations have highlighted ethics’ role in clinical competencies for chaplains. However, as there is no standardized curriculum for Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE), the clinical training required to pursue professional chaplaincy, each CPE Center determines the content and methodology for teaching ethics–if it’s taught at all.
After learning that ethics competencies make up a significant percentage of the questions failed in chaplaincy board certification processes, a chaplain educator and clinical ethicist sought to 1. Discern what ethics-related knowledge and skills are needed by chaplains, 2. Develop a curriculum that would foster that learning, 3. Evaluate our current curriculum in light of the goals we had developed, and 4. Revise the curriculum based on those goals and student feedback. Our goals include grounding our students in ethical theory and helping them integrate ethics into their practice as chaplains and ethics leaders in their organizations. In this presentation, we will highlight our curricular review process and subsequent outcomes.

Annette Mendola, PhD, HEC-C – Director of Clinical Ethics & Associate Professor, Department of Medicine, University of Tennessee Medical Center