Gu, Hospitals To Begin Chaplain Training Program 50 People On Waiting List For Course That Will Serve Only Eight Students A Year

God is back in medicine.

Beginning in January, five area hospitals and Gonzaga University will open a pioneering training program for health-care chaplains.

Some 50 people already are on the waiting list.

Twenty wrote Gonzaga graduate dean Leonard Doohan when they heard rumors of the program.

But the intensive training effort will accommodate only eight students a year.

“This is one of the most widely expanding areas of the ministry today,” Doohan said. People are recognizing that healing involves the mind, body and spirit, he said.

Hospitals and prisons long have employed chaplains.

Nationally, nursing homes, law firms and even a trucking company have added chaplains to their payrolls, Doohan said.

“Somebody who is trained in this is helpful, not only to patients, but sometimes to the staff of a hospital,” which is under constant stress, he said.

Other companies also are recognizing the value of chaplains in helping clients as well as employees in difficult jobs.

The GU program will run in conjunction with four Spokane hospitals - Sacred Heart Medical Center, Deaconess Medical Center, Valley Hospital and Medical Center and Holy Family Hospital - and Kootenai Medical Center in Coeur d’Alene.

Students will undergo 400 hours of training, half of it in direct contact with patients while under the supervision of certified chaplains.

The program will train people seeking to become certified as chaplains as well as people earning theology degrees.

Sacred Heart and Deaconess each had chaplain training programs that were shut down about five years ago, Doohan said.

A year ago, the vice presidents of the five hospitals asked Gonzaga to run a chaplain program.

It’s the first such program in the country based at a university, Doohan said.