The role of chaplain is one providing spiritual and emotional support for all patients, regardless of religion.
People sometimes make assumptions when Kaeli Joyce visits their hospital rooms to chat.
Several minutes into one particular conversation, a patient asked if Joyce had come to tell her she was going to die.
“If a chaplain comes to visit you, we really just care about you as a person and want to be here for you,” Joyce said to Salish Current. “You aren’t necessarily dying.”
The Bellingham resident is in her first year at PeaceHealth St. Joseph Medical Center as one of the hospital’s four full-time chaplains. In addition, the medical campus has palliative care and oncology chaplains, in addition to per diem chaplains who are called upon as-needed.
There are no overnight chaplains at St. Joe’s, meaning that off-duty chaplains are given pagers and scheduled to be on-call for given evenings, in case they’re requested. Chaplains are automatically paged for emergency room traumas, subsequently assessing whether to come to the hospital or not, Joyce said.
Chaplains are part of St. Joe’s Spiritual Care team, which includes student interns from the hospital’s Clinical Pastoral Education Program. The hospital’s website describes the CPEP as an “experiential theological education” for developing skills for spiritual care of patients, their families and hospital staff.
Chaplain services, Joyce said, can be requested by either caregivers or patients. If nobody requires their immediate attention, chaplains are free to make their daily rounds, inquiring with staff about who they might want to speak with.
Sometimes, Joyce said, they’re hospital providers themselves. Chaplains often see what Joyce refers to as “moral distress” — perhaps a family isn’t ready to transition a terminally-ill family member to comfort care, while that patient’s caregivers are concerned that the family’s decision may not be the ideal one for the patient.
In other situations, Joyce has spoken with staff after a patient dies, making sure they are doing OK emotionally.
More often than death, Joyce said, chaplains deal with people in-hospital for shorter periods, usually in non-life-threatening situations, who may not even want to speak about the reason they’re there.
Instead, being at the hospital becomes a catalyst for a conversation about deeper concerns in a patient’s life, like a personal estrangement, she said.
Becoming a chaplain
Joyce grew up in Centralia and was raised as a Protestant Christian.
After graduating from high school, she considered becoming a nurse and then a bible studies teacher. She attended Gonzaga University in Spokane, graduating with a degree in religious studies and classical civilizations.
During ministry work at Gonzaga, Joyce was first introduced to chaplaincy by a professor. The stories she heard captured her interest, and soon after, an aunt who worked as a nurse provided Joyce a meeting with a chaplain from Spokane’s Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center.
Melding the medical and ministry worlds made sense to Joyce, she said, tying together aspects of her life that previously felt like loose ends.
On-staff chaplains are commonly found at hospitals, cancer centers and hospices of regional faith-based health organizations like PeaceHealth and Providence, as well as at secularly-operated hospitals like Harborview Medical Center.
In addition, many fire and sheriff’s departments also have on-staff or volunteer chaplains, as do some nursing homes.
“I feel there’s a recognition in healthcare, largely, that people are multifaceted beings,” she said. “It’s beneficial to their bodies for their spirits to be at rest, or to be attended to as well.”
A chaplain’s work
Joyce describes her work as the spiritual-emotional aspect of St. Joe’s “whole person care” mission.
“When you’re in any situation that brings you to a hospital, often for many people, it brings up emotional or spiritual concerns or anxieties,” she said.
Having conversations with patients — and listening carefully to them — about complicated emotions like grief, fear and even joy, Joyce said, are core aspects of her job. And those conversations don’t have to be religious in nature, she added, as she’s not there to evangelize or get them to attend church.
Chaplains often encounter patients outside of their own personal religious tradition or any organized religious tradition, as well as those who don’t consider themselves religious at all, she said.
“I believe all people are spiritual beings,” Joyce said. “We may have different beliefs about what that means, or how that plays out, but (chaplains are) really here to attend to the person’s soul, spirit, heart and emotions.”
Roughly half of the patients Joyce serves identify as being atheist, agnostic or spiritual, or otherwise have no religious preference, she said. While some atheists will decline all spiritual care, Joyce said that many nonreligious or nonpracticing patients still value spiritual support enough to welcome her into their rooms.
“I have been so amazed at and humbled by the level of trust put in me by my atheist patients as they welcome the opportunity to engage categories such as hope and meaning making and grief with a spiritual care provider,” Joyce said. “Many atheists want to engage existential questions, and that fits very well under the umbrella of spiritual care.”
Chaplains cannot give last rites or perform confessions for patients, though Catholic chaplains can offer communion. Likewise, chaplains can act as liaisons between patients and their specific religious community, getting the appropriate person to come in for something like a specific blessing.
The diversity of chaplaincy at St. Joe’s includes two Jewish chaplains and a Muslim chaplain, Joyce said. During Ramadan, the spiritual care team provides items needed for Muslim caregivers to pray in the hospital chapel, she added.
Joyce usually cares directly for someone of another faith about once a month, she said.
“A few months back I responded to the death of a Sikh patient and attended the family until they left the hospital without any need or request on their part to bring in a minister from their tradition,” Joyce recalled. “In that case, a big part of my work was communicating with the family and the funeral home to make sure the funeral home would be able to meet their religious needs.”
Closer to thee
The conversations Joyce has with patients can last anywhere from 10 to 90 minutes. Even a short encounter with a chaplain, she said, can sometimes be extraordinary meaningful for patients — whether it’s quelling a patient’s pre-surgery anxiety or helping them look to their religion in a moment in fear.
“I’m just amazed by the value of a short encounter, sometimes,” she said. “It’s part of what gives me hope in my work.”
Joyce sees chaplaincy as a kind of short-term friendship, being with people in kindness and intention, during their time at St Joe’s. She almost never communicates with patients or families she speaks with after they’ve left the hospital, the one exception being for bereavement calls.
On occasion, Joyce tells patients she’ll speak with them the following day, only to return and discover that they’ve died. Once, during her initial internship, she was with a patient in the ER when they died.
Being a chaplain in someone’s final moments, or the immediate aftermath of those moments, has made Joyce want to live her life preparing for death, she said. In the medieval Christian tradition, she explained, the notion of a “holy death” is best found by living a holy life.
“It’s not about preparing in the hours or even weeks before you die, but about living a whole life,” Joyce said. “It’s made me want to engage death while I’m alive, because I want to be a person who could be at peace when I meet death.”
By Matt Benoit
Also read in Salish Current:
• “Way Station respite center midway through soft launch,” Aug 20, 2025
• “Local hospice stands out in shift away from nonprofits,” June 25, 2025
• “Negotiations still on for three unions striking against PeaceHealth,” June 9, 2025
• “Proposed changes to state’s Death with Dignity Act spark debate,” Feb. 16, 2023
• “Possible hospice sale sparks concerns about changes in end-of-life care,” Jan. 12, 2021