Spiritual Care at Piedmont Atlanta
Professional chaplains are responsible for providing spiritual and emotional support for patients, families, and hospital staff. Whether a person has a deep-seated faith, a questioning faith, or no faith, chaplains are clinically trained to provide care and support, to be the person who can pull up a chair and stay. Chaplains are members of the interdisciplinary team, assessing patients’ needs in a variety of ways and shaping specific interventions to lower spiritual distress and increase resilience, resulting in improved patient outcomes.
Chaplains provide, among other things:
- Spiritual support
- Emotional care
- Liaison services for Roman Catholic, Jewish and Jehovah’s Witness patients through formal volunteer relationships.
- Outreach to an individual’s particular clergy or place of worship when requested.
- Support in the midst of difficult decisions and grief.
- Care when experiencing fear, anger, anxiety, or loss.
Spiritual Care is integrated into the life of Piedmont Atlanta Hospital, with chaplains serving on both formal and informal committees, including the Ethics Committee, the Institutional Review Board, Cancer Committee, and Mended Hearts. A large role is also hospital staff support. In the stressful modern healthcare environment, we provide a listening ear, support in the midst of difficult situations, space to talk and debrief, and grief support.
Spiritual Care Services at Piedmont Atlanta Hospital maintains four (4) full-time chaplains and nine (9) on-call chaplains. Chaplains are available twenty-four (24) hours a day, seven (7) days a week. Monday through Thursday, there is a chaplain in the hospital from 8:00 a.m. until 8:00 p.m., and on Fridays from 8:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m. On nights and weekends, there is always an on-call chaplain available.
The Spiritual Care Services office is on the third floor of the 77 Building. The main department number is 404-605-3558, the preferred number for general referrals. Please call the hospital operator at 404-605-5000 for time-sensitive situations or requests and ask for the on-call chaplain.
The hospital chapel is located on the hospital's first floor, near admissions and the surgery waiting area.
Piedmont Atlanta does not offer the Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) program.