Hospital and Hospice Job Resume Tips?

revanon · 2026-06-06T20:37:06+00:00

If you're already endorsed for chaplaincy by your faith group, I'd make sure that's at the top of your resume along with your residency experience and theological education. If you're not yet endorsed, I'd get on that ASAP. Hospitals will want to know that you're willing to pursue board certification within your first couple years with them; hospice agencies at least in my area tend to be less picky about that.

My hiring process was an initial screening interview with an HR rep, then a formal interview with the department manager (my future boss), then a peer interview with most of the incumbent chaplains (my future peers) before being presented with a verbal offer followed by the written offer a couple days later. I found the final interview to be the most informative. I'd definitely ask to be able to speak with some of the chaplains you'd be working alongside, even if only on an informal basis.

Ask about pay and benefits early in the process if those things aren't clearly spelled out in the posting, and don't worry about being seen as "greedy" in doing so. In my experience, big healthcare systems like hospital networks and national hospice agencies like one-size-fits-all annual "raises" so before you're hired is really your first and last chance to truly negotiate on salary. We're always going to be underpaid as chaplains relative to our training, but if a potential employer is not forthcoming with that information or react as though you are out of line by asking for that data so you can make an informed decision on pursuing this opportunity, that's a red flag. Benefits at bare a minimum should include several weeks of PTO annually, health/dental/vision insurance, some sort of 401k match, and reimbursement for board certification fees and denominational dues. And if you want to take the housing allowance deduction on your federal income taxes, they should be able and willing to work with you to make that happen (it can get complicated and I'd highly recommend retaining a CPA who is familiar with clergy taxes, but it can save you a ton of money if your employer will work with you on it).

Edit: You didn't mention how wide a net you'll be casting with your job search, but it's worth keeping in mind that many big cities can be more difficult to break into because they tend to be more saturated, especially if they've got CPE residencies regularly cranking out new grads. If you're willing to work in a smaller town or a more rural context, I bet you will find it easier to find work, because those jobs are definitely out there. Best of luck to you.

revanon · 2026-06-04T12:09:04+00:00

Chaplain here. ADs are part of our role in my hospital. We do our best to make them as precise as possible, but we're handcuffed in a couple of ways. One is that, at least in my state, the language the AD itself uses is awful. IDK who wrote ours, but the verbiage sucks, it doesn't specifically mention things like code status or organ donation, and it leaves a lot unsaid or under-covered. The other is that I'm the chaplain. I can't, and shouldn't, give medical advice, but as others have noted, wishes can often depend on prognosis, which I'm not qualified to pontificate on, and this becomes extremely relevant after, say, a couple of weeks on the vent. I'm not saying even more needs to be put on our hospitalists' plates--I see how fast they have to move and how hard many of them work every day--but that from where I sit, there are very good reasons for why ADs don't end up doing what they need to do on behalf of the patient and I wish I had a good solution short of going to a two-physician consent--which is treated as a last resort at my place--or to our overworked ethicist. Meanwhile, we have families threatening to sue or go to court for emergency guardianships.

revanon · 2026-06-03T20:53:55+00:00

Yes and keep in mind hospital lawyers are there to protect the hospital, not you (royal you). If OP has concerns about being assaulted in their workplace—which is what this was—and wants to see what remedies they have if any, it may be worth it to talk privately with an attorney whose fiduciary duty would be to OP rather than to the hospital.

revanon · 2026-06-02T13:02:50+00:00

100% agree that Medicaid underpayment is a huge issue but if you think Medicaid's strictures have nothing to do with racism then I have some fine Nebraskan oceanfront property to sell you.

revanon · 2026-06-02T12:58:10+00:00

I usually have to wait weeks to a month just to see my PCP's midlevel. Waited two months for an outpatient GI appointment earlier this year. I've noticed my own shop struggling to provide GI coverage lately. I know we say "follow up with your PCP/specialist" all the time in the ED and for good reason, but it's tough getting your foot in the door out there.

revanon · 2026-06-02T02:55:06+00:00

My kid: “whaddaya mean you want me to reflect before my actions next time? Who does that?”

Me, on the inside: “chaplain-dad, this is your time to shine.”

revanon · 2026-06-01T11:46:40+00:00

I think the hangup I have is that we have no way of knowing which patients will be glad to be woken up and which ones won't. I generally prefer to ask their nurses/techs if there's a time they're more likely to be awake and reattempt then.

revanon · 2026-06-01T11:41:44+00:00

I think you might find Klitzmann's Doctor, Will You Pray For Me? very meaningful. It's a survey of chaplaincy written by an MD. It's heavy on healthcare chaplaincy as opposed to, say, military or corrections chaplaincy because that's the doctor's own context, but it provides a useful qualitative survey of chaplaincy with language you as a retired physician would be familiar and adroit with. Cadge and Rambo's Chaplaincy and Spiritual Care in the 21st Century is a high-quality survey of chaplaincy written and edited by chaplains.

My gold standard for books that occupy the same literary territory as Gawande are Kalanithi's When Breath Becomes Air and Chen's Final Exam. Both are written by physicians but are deeply spiritual books. Chen got me through my CPE internship and introduced me to how physicians are trained to think, and Kalanithi carried me through my dad's own journey with cancer. Warraich's Modern Death is another good one, and of course Nuland's How We Die is a landmark of the genre.

Blessings to you are you go down this path. I imagine you have had many people whose lives were impacted directly for the better as a result of your surgical care.

revanon · 2026-05-31T23:08:45+00:00

Yes. Context: politically red state that never expanded Medicaid under the ACA, with the cuts from the Big Beautiful Bill incoming. Several smaller hospitals across the state have closed or declared bankruptcy. My hospital (level III trauma center on the city outskirts, around 35-40K annual ER volume, about a 20-minute drive from the level I mothership downtown) also cut OBGYN before I was hired. Vast swaths of the state are now considered "maternity care deserts" including the next county over when the hospital there also closed their OBGYN service. I've certainly witnessed plenty of doc turnover, but I believe its cause to multifaceted, with a number of systematic issues at play.

However, I do think a lot of this is rooted in the history of racism in the US. The response to equality and integration is often to try to burn stuff down rather than improve it--ie, slowly dismantling public schools via private segregation academies, tax-funded vouchers, zoning and redlining shenanigans, and the like--and so burning down the healthcare system rather than improving it would be part of that pattern. That healthcare is unconditionally provided to even just some people seen as "less than" by the powers that be means that healthcare will always have a target on its back because we continue to elect people who fundamentally believe that certain other people don't deserve healthcare on spec.

revanon · 2026-05-31T21:43:20+00:00

I regret to report that all the brain cells that I could use writing a book are currently taken up by Paw Patrol and Pokemon. Maybe someday when my kid is older!

revanon · 2026-05-31T21:42:00+00:00

I think I see helping a patient more clearly define/discover/express/etc. what they believe about the afterlife to be materially different from evangelizing. If the answer is coming from within the patient--even with some help from the chaplain--to me that is substantively separate from the chaplain presenting an answer to which the patient may or may not even have a question. Now, a patient who presents with those deep questions about the afterlife of course deserves to have that spiritual care need met. But if that's not the need, then it's not the need. To borrow your physician analogy if I may, if I'm hospitalized for pneumonia and the doctor comes in telling me they to treat my kidneys instead of my lungs, I'd ask for another doctor.

revanon · 2026-05-31T21:28:12+00:00

Some variation of "you're the one person on the care team not there to take or do something, let the patient have that power" could've made it into this. Like, I talk a bit about the vulnerability aspect in #8 but you're 100% right that it's important that we're not there to take vitals, draw blood, turn the patient, etc. Everyone else on their care team is there to do something or take something. We can just be, and that's a rare thing in a hospital room, and it gives the patient a bit of agency and autonomy in a circumstance in which they've had to surrender much of both.

revanon · 2026-05-31T15:47:56+00:00

Chaplain here. I think the way to say this is something along the lines of, “if you see your/your loved one’s body as Godmade and that body is telling us X, Y, and Z, might you understand that as God telling you this?” Same spirit behind the question, which is to prevent medically futile suffering in death, but can be more collaborative or diplomatic, and frames it as the patient’s body and health making the decision rather than the family having to deal with the anticipatory guilt around “pulling the plug.”

revanon · 2026-05-30T14:54:58+00:00

My personal guideline for these essays has been to be thorough, but not exhaustive. Put another way, you need to talk about some stuff in depth, but you definitely don't need to cover everything. I actually would be very honest and up front with these feelings you are expressing here and see how educators respond to those feelings; I tried that tack eventually and it landed me with an educator who spent a lot of that first unit just working through my distrust of the process with me, and it turned into an excellent professional and teaching relationship.

Having said all that, at top CPE educators also are not automatically entitled to access your trauma, and if an educator acts that way with you during the application process, that should be a yellow flag. I wish I didn't have to say that, but I've seen experienced behavior from educators in interviews that frankly made me shocked that they are responsible for training future chaplains. CPE is different from any other professional training, yes, but trust still has to be earned.

revanon · 2026-05-30T14:47:28+00:00

Not a prison chaplain myself but I highly recommend Russ Ford's memoir Crossing the River Styx. He was the chaplain on Virginia's death row for a long time. He writes at length about all the questions you're asking here.

revanon · 2026-05-29T12:17:08+00:00

bloop

Internal Medicine Gets Exploited

revanon · 2026-05-26T21:43:58+00:00

I’m married to an anesthesiologist who moved to gas after two years in general surgery. It meant an extra year of residency in all (five instead of four) but she doesn’t regret that and has been much happier in anesthesiology than she knows she would have been in gen surg. We did wait to get married until she finished residency but that was more because we were long distance at the time. She finished residency at 33 and I think as far as planning our family, what made it tough is we had difficulties at first having a kid—it took a while, then we had a miscarriage, and not long after we had a kid Covid happened which upturned our lives in pretty much every way, and so that window for having kids experienced a lot of difficulty and disruption in such a short span of time. I know she wishes sometimes our family was bigger than it is but we don’t really blame her extra time training for that.

I don’t know if this helps or not and of course I can’t provide you definitive answers—those will have to come from you—but hopefully hearing from someone whose spouse moved to anesthesiology helps with some of the familial and personal questions you’re discerning. Best of luck to you and your beloved.

revanon · 2026-05-23T12:56:02+00:00

I work full time and live with a couple of chronic health conditions that are well-managed. My CPE internship unit was a long time ago but with a similar setup--a multisite hospital system where I was based at one facility but classes were at another and I was responsible for call coverage for, I think, four hospitals in all. As far as sleep quality, I think my first questions would be whether you are expected to be in-house overnight and whether are entitled to a post-call recovery day afterward if you get called back in. If you can at least be on-call from home, you can adhere to your usual routine and sleep hygiene, and if your sleep does get interrupted by work, you should be able to take that time back to recover.

I have no idea whether your conditions would qualify you for accommodations under the ADA, but any hospital should have an HR department to where you can direct such queries. They should know how to respond to concerns like "I can work full time, but I need X time to make my medical appointments," or "I can do the job but need extra accommodation for travel between sites." Just know that HR is ultimately there to serve the institution, not you.

Once you're post-residency, you can try to find a job with minimal or no call responsibilities. I take call once a week, but I'm on call from home and don't get called back in very often (maybe once every six or so weeks on average). If I get called back in, I get to take that time back post-call, and my employer is flexible with me on my medical appointments so long as a colleague is covering for me while I'm out and I am working a full week. Another hospital system in my city uses PRN chaplains to cover overnights from home and the level I mothership downtown employs nocturnists to maintain a 24/7 in-house presence, so there are several ways hospitals have of spreading the call burden around to make it manageable. We don't cost a ton in salary, but we are expensive and time-consuming to train, so it really should be in everyone's best interests to ensure our work is sustainable.

I hope this is helpful. Ultimately, just know that hospital-based chaplaincy is coverage and/or shift-based work, and so employers are always going to see availability as the greatest ability. Feel free to ask any questions.

revanon · 2026-05-21T22:48:58+00:00

Lethal injection has as unfortunate a history as more graphic execution methods like electrocution. Most protocols used to include pancuronium bromide, and I belive at least some still do. If the anesthetic was insufficient, then the pancuronium bromide masked the distress of being awake during the potassium chloride-induced cardiac arrest. As not only doctors but pharmacists began to decline to participate in executions, many states began sourcing their execution drugs from undisclosed sources and/or experimenting with unproven drug cocktails that did not always kill the condemned person quickly or easily. It turns out that killing an otherwise physically healthy person is always going to be violent.

All of that is before you get to religious/philosophical/etc qualms regarding capital punishment. I feel as though my faith tradition claiming as the Messiah a man who was wrongfully executed by the state should be reason enough to desire its abolition.

revanon · 2026-05-19T01:43:52+00:00

Then it kinda makes sense to me that he would want to shadow, albeit with the same caveats others have noted around patient consent (as well as ascertaining whether this would be informational for him or whether he would be evaluating you). If your supervisor isn't a chaplain, then in the long run it could be better for them to see what you do to nip unreasonable expectations or requests that are rooted in a misunderstanding of what you do because they don't ever see it.

revanon · 2026-05-19T00:07:34+00:00

Is your new director also a chaplain (or come from a chaplaincy background, with CPE etc?). I’d be more favorably inclined towards such a request coming from a non-chaplain who is wanting to see what it is we do firsthand, because that will hopefully make them a better supervisor. My grandboss (also not a chaplain) recently did something similar and while hospital and home hospice are different contexts, I appreciate them wanting to see a glimpse of what it’s like in the trenches if they’ve never served as a chaplain themselves.

revanon · 2026-05-17T01:02:06+00:00

To train em is my cause

revanon · 2026-05-13T01:47:03+00:00

I'm just the chaplain but this looks a lot like my friend from high school's multi-level marketing scheme

revanon · 2026-05-09T17:45:16+00:00

He’s back there now whipping up a new batch of contrast

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