Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute (PPI) offers Spiritual Care Services to meet the spiritual, emotional and religious needs of all our patients and their families.
The spiritual care team includes:
- Full time Staff Chaplains
- Catholic Deacon
- Chaplain Assistant volunteers
- Liaisons for other faith traditions (Jewish, Jehovah Witness, Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist)
Patient and staff support
The spiritual care team offers support to patients and their families while they are receiving care at PPI. Patient confidentiality and cultural needs are respected at all times. Additionally, the spiritual care team provides spiritual and emotional support to staff and can act as a liaison between clinical staff, patients, families and friends.
The spiritual care team offers patients and their families support including:
- Understand and cope with illness
- Cope with grief and loss
- Counseling of patients, families and friends
- Offering prayers and the administration of sacraments
- Providing crisis support
- Assisting with ethical and moral decisions
- Serving as a patient advocate
The Chaplain can be contacted when:
- A request is made by a patient or family
- A request is made by the clergy
- The patient is experiencing grief, anxiety, depression, loneliness or personal issues
- There are ethical or moral dilemmas
- There are crisis situations
Religious resources
There are Religious Libraries located on each inpatient unit. They contain various religious materials such as Bibles and devotionals in English, Spanish and large print; Qur’ans; Jewish Tanakhs; Jehovah Witnesses scriptures; Book of Mormon and many other items. Please ask staff for additional text for your religious tradition.Getting started
A Chaplain is located at PPI on Wednesdays from 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. A member of the spiritual care team is on-call 24 hours a day to respond to patient needs.Patients should inform a member of the patient’s healthcare team if they would like to have an individual visit with one of the Chaplains.
Children 13 years and under must have a signed consent form from a parent or guardian in order to allow one-on-one chaplain visits.