Supporting Spiritual Care

Patients at Swedish and their families and friends are often struggling with pain, suffering and life-threatening illnesses.

Providing comfort

At Swedish, our chaplains make nearly 8,000 visits a year to patients and their families, providing emotional and spiritual support through compassionate listening and presence, ritual and/or prayer. Our chaplains also provide individual or family counseling. We offer assistance in contacting spiritual leaders in all faith traditions.

Our chaplains also provide bereavement support to patient and their families, and to the broader community.  We are available to provide care and comfort while you are at Swedish, and to guide you to community resources.  Our chaplains also extend support and counsel to Swedish staff.

Providing education

In addition to spiritual care, our team provides supervised Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) programs consisting of:

• A ten week summer internship

• A nine month residency

Under supervision of the CPE Supervisor and Spiritual Care staff, students of many faith traditions learn about and participate in direct ministry to patients, families and staff.  Our CPE students grow in self-knowledge through a rigorous educational experience.

You can help

Help support the Swedish Clinical Pastoral Education programs, which train both clergy and lay people for their call to hospital chaplain ministry, through a contribution to the Spiritual Care department.

This program enhances the students' learning experiences, and provides wider and more consistent spiritual care coverage for patients at all our Swedish campuses. With your support, Swedish can continue to provide spiritual care in critical areas, including the intensive-care units, cardiac care, oncology, addiction-recovery services, psychiatric services and the neonatal intensive-care unit.

For more information, call the Swedish Spiritual Care department at 206-386-2082.