Hospitals

Bringing God into the workplace creates calm, not controversy for Signature Healthcare

Eight years ago, Dianne Timmering had no budget for her new department of spirituality at […]

Eight years ago, Dianne Timmering had no budget for her new department of spirituality at Signature HealthCARE.

She now runs the largest for-profit department of spirituality in the country with a $4 million budget and full-time chaplains at all 87 facilities in Signature’s network.

“We built it on an ROI model,” she said. “It is a huge value-added component for us, it impacts clinical outcomes and retention.”

The company uses an interfaith model for its spirituality programs and has chaplain advisory boards in every community. Timmering said that there is no proselytising or evangelizing. Also, if a chaplain cannot provide what an individual needs, he or she will find a clergy member in the community who can. Signature has found a way to balance respect for many religions with a genuine expression of those same beliefs.

“We don’t water it down; if you’re Christian you get to be Christian, you get to be who you are, you get to bring your spiritual skin inside Signature,” she said.

Timmering works out of the company’s headquarters in Louisville, but has helped to establish the chaplain program in long-term care facilities around the country, including a community in southern Florida.

“In West Palm we are highly diverse, with Orthodox Jews, Muslims and Catholics,” she said. “It’s a special chaplain that can do a Shabbat service and a Catholic service and possibly teach Buddhist philosophy.”

She also shared a story about a patient who was a Native American. The family wanted the 23rd psalm translated into the Sioux tongue. The chaplain helped make this happen so that the family could recite the psalm at the patient’s bedside.

Atheists are welcome, too.
“Everyone always says, ‘Dianne, what about the atheists?’ I always reply that I would protect that atheist with every ounce of my being to be who they are,” she said.

Measuring the return
Timmering said that she has two measures to gauge the effect of the full-time chaplains. First, family scores of the facilities have gone up, as the chaplains helped people deal with the complex emotions involved in placing family members in a long-term-care facility.
Second, spiritual support seemed to encourage patients to complete physical therapy.

“A lot of people have no hope of getting better so they see no reason to do therapy, but then a chaplain intervenes and encourages people to finish their therapy minutes,” Timmering said. “We have quantified this with a very direct inductive reasoning that a chaplain encounter impacted the therapy prescribed by the physician, creating better outcomes for patients and more reimbursable minutes.”

Not just for patients
At Signature, employees are called stakeholders. The chaplains are available to them as well.
Timmering said that having full-time chaplains in every facility has reduced turnover among stakeholders.
“Long-term folks face mortality and end-of-life issues, so a lot of our stakeholders are slugging it out on the front line,” Timmering said. “Our chaplains are for the residents, family members, people in hospital system, everyone along the continuum of care.

Spirituality and education are two of the three guiding principles at Signature, with intra-preneurship completing the list. Timmering said that education has a strong connection to the spirituality component. During her time at Signature, Timmering also developed a company-wide program on spiritual and emotional intelligence.

“We want our stakeholders to have good discernment, and always be asking, is that the right decision, is that the right wisdom?” she said. “Spirituality is great but you have to have that faith in works also.”

Veronica Combs

Veronica is an independent journalist and communications strategist. For more than 10 years, she has covered health and healthcare with a focus on innovation and patient engagement. Most recently she managed strategic partnerships and communications for AIR Louisville, a digital health project focused on asthma. The team recruited 7 employer partners, enrolled 1,100 participants and collected more than 250,000 data points about rescue inhaler use. Veronica has worked for startups for almost 20 years doing everything from launching blogs, newsletters and patient communities to recruiting speakers, moderating panel conversations and developing new products. You can reach her on Twitter @vmcombs.

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