UPMC clarifies visitation policy to allow clergy in hospitals
Dr. Dan Hall notes he wears both “a stethoscope and a stole” around his neck — that is, his equipment as a UPMC surgeon and his liturgical vestment, which he wears in his other role as an Episcopal priest.
So he took particular note when he heard fellow clergy lamenting that they couldn’t visit members of their congregations in the hospital due to visitor restrictions during the COVID-19 outbreak.
“I was hearing a great degree of sadness they were not able to do what they normally did, which is visit the sick in the hospital,” he said, but thought to himself: “Really, that can’t be right.”
And as it turns out, he said, it wasn’t. He said when he checked with UPMC leadership, the restrictions on visitors were never intended to curb visits by a patient’s clergy person. But because many clergy believed they were among the visitors who could not enter hospitals at the time, he started a dialogue with UPMC leaders to have the policy spelled out more specifically. By early April, he said, leaders added an explicit policy “to clarify that clergy are welcome as essential personnel” at the region’s largest
hospital network.
While clergy are screened at the hospital entrance like other essential workers for fever and symptoms, and required to wear a mask, they are allowed to make specific visits to members of their faith communities in the general hospital population.
If the patient was being treated for confirmed or suspected cases of COVID-19, the clergy initially could communicate remotely, such as through a tablet. But more recently, UPMC set policies allowing clergy to suit up in personal protective equipment to visit in the room of a COVID-19 patient.
For the same reason, the hospital network is also allowing one care partner (such as a close relative) to visit an adult patient under similar circumstances, and two in the case of children.
In the Allegheny Health Network’s hospitals, spokesman Dan Laurent said the policy is similar: Clergy have been allowed to visit members of their faith communities, though in cases in which COVID-19 is confirmed or suspected they need to put on the personal protective equipment.
Dr. Hall said it’s important to view the visits of a patient’s clergy person as essential.
“Cutting patients off from their communities of religious support is short sighted,” Dr. Hall wrote in an unpublished essay on the topic, which he has submitted for medical-journal consideration. Social isolation “is a source of great suffering for those with disease,” he added. Pastoral visits may not cure the suffering, but they do provide comfort and bear witness to “the humanity of the patient, the pastoral visitor and all those who surround them.”
Dr. Hall is medical director for high-risk populations and outcomes at UPMC and an associate professor of surgery at the University of Pittsburgh. As a priest, he also assists at First Lutheran Church in Downtown. (Lutherans and Episcopalians cooperate across denominational lines.)
While the hospitals have their staff chaplains who serve all regardless of faith background, they usually don’t know the patients personally, whereas visiting clergy have that connection, he noted. That said, clergy have to have a specific person to visit, not go room to room like a chaplain might.
“You are welcome to come and continue that existing relationship” with a congregation member. “It’s not an opportunity to create new ones.”