Do Not Forget the Spirit: Exploring Pastoral Care Pedagogies in Medical Education
Audrey Zhou, Harvard Divinity School, Northwestern University

In the vulnerable space of illness, the fickle and often ill-defined patient-physician relationship is an integral pillar of the healthcare experience. A unique dynamic requiring radical trust, intimacy, and surrender, questions of “What does it mean to be a good doctor?” and “How can we teach physicians to truly care for another person?” are imperative for quality patient care. Recognizing that the spiritual care dimension of medical care and education has been long overlooked, Do Not Forget the Spirit is an honors thesis project that explores how components of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE), an interfaith professional education that trains hospital chaplains and ministers to care for people in crisis, are valuable and viable pedagogies for the education of physicians and other medical professionals. Drawing upon autoethnographic experience as a chaplain intern, interviews with healthcare professionals (including chaplains, educators, students, physicians, and nurses), and contemporary research literature, I argue for the explicit value of early exposure to and engagement with spiritual care departments and CPE-style educational opportunities for students in medical school. These interventions can not only foster more cohesive interprofessional and collaborative patient caretaking between physicians and chaplains, but also encourage medical students to turn inwards and contemplate the humanistic aspects of what it means to be a healer. Do Not Forget the Spirit aims to outline a compelling and comprehensive argument for the integration of spiritual care shadowing and training for all medical students, as well as provide a range of programmatic suggestions for how these ideas might be complementarily implemented into existing medical curricula.