Overview
The Director of Pastoral Care provides strategic, compassionate, and inclusive spiritual leadership across Brookdale Hospital Medical Center. Serving one of Brooklyn's most diverse communities and operating within a fast-paced Level II Trauma Center, the Director ensures patients, families, and staff have access to meaningful spiritual and emotional support during times of crisis, grief, serious illness, trauma, end-of-life situations, and healing, - while also integrating pastoral care into executive-level planning and institutional culture.
Operating within an interfaith, culturally responsive, and trauma-informed framework, the Director manages chaplaincy services, leads staff support initiatives, and oversees policies related to ethics, compassionate withdrawal, and organ donation.
The Director serves as a trusted resource to patients, families, clinical teams, hospital leadership, and community faith partners. This leader must bring presence, empathy, sound judgment, and calm leadership to some of the most difficult and deeply human moments experienced within the healthcare environment.
Responsibilities
Leadership and Program Management:- Provide strategic and operational leadership for Pastoral Care services at Brookdale Hospital Medical Center.
- Develop and maintain an inclusive, trauma-informed spiritual-care program aligned with One Brooklyn Health's mission and patient-care priorities.
- Establish departmental goals, policies, procedures, service standards, and performance measures.
- Represent Pastoral Care in executive, clinical, interdisciplinary, and hospital-wide initiatives.
- Manage departmental operations, including staffing, scheduling, budgeting, documentation, and resource allocation.
Patient and Family Spiritual Care:- Provide compassionate spiritual and emotional support to patients and families across all faith traditions, cultures, beliefs, and backgrounds.
- Respond to trauma, medical emergencies, critical illness, infant or fetal loss, grief, end-of-life care, and sudden or unexpected death.
- Support patients and families during complex medical decisions, withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment, and organ or tissue donation discussions.
- Coordinate prayer, religious rites, sacraments, memorial services, clergy visits, and other requested spiritual practices.
- Facilitate grief support, bereavement, spiritual-enrichment, and other therapeutic groups.
Staff Support and Interdisciplinary Collaboration:- Provide confidential emotional and spiritual support to employees, physicians, and clinical teams.
- Lead trauma debriefings, grief-support sessions, memorial observances, and restorative gatherings following difficult events.
- Partner with hospital leadership to address compassion fatigue, moral distress, cumulative grief, and employee well-being.
- Serve on the Ethics Committee and participate in complex patient-care and end-of-life consultations.
- Collaborate with Nursing, Medicine, Social Work, Case Management, Behavioral Health, Palliative Care, Patient Experience, Human Resources, and other departments.
Clergy and Volunteer Services:- Recruit, credential, orient, schedule, supervise, and evaluate volunteer clergy and pastoral-care responders.
- Develop a diverse clergy network that reflects the faith traditions, cultures, and spiritual needs of the communities served by One Brooklyn Health.
- Maintain reliable weekday rounding and on-call coverage for urgent pastoral-care needs.
- Ensure clergy and volunteers meet hospital onboarding, training, confidentiality, health-clearance, and competency requirements.
- Build collaborative relationships with local faith leaders, religious organizations, and community partners.
Quality, Compliance, and Emergency Response:- Ensure timely and appropriate documentation of spiritual-care services in the electronic medical record.
- Monitor service utilization, response times, program outcomes, and opportunities for improvement.
- Ensure compliance with hospital policies, patient privacy requirements, safety standards, and professional chaplaincy practices.
- Participate in emergency-preparedness planning and provide spiritual-care leadership during hospital emergencies, community crises, and mass-casualty events.
Qualifications
Education:- Master of Divinity, Master of Theology, Master of Pastoral Studies, or another graduate degree in theology, religion, spiritual care, pastoral counseling, or a closely related discipline from an accredited institution required.
- Completion of Clinical Pastoral Education through an accredited or nationally recognized program strongly preferred.
Experience: - Minimum of three (3) years of progressively responsible chaplaincy or pastoral-care experience in a hospital, healthcare, trauma, hospice, palliative-care, behavioral-health, or similarly complex setting required.
- Experience providing spiritual care during trauma, crisis, grief, serious illness, and end-of-life situations required.
- Previous leadership experience overseeing chaplaincy services, clergy, volunteers, or a pastoral-care program strongly preferred.
- Experience working in an urban, multicultural, multifaith healthcare environment strongly preferred.
Knowledge, Skills and Abilities:- Demonstrated ability to provide compassionate, nonjudgmental, and culturally responsive spiritual care to individuals representing a wide range of faith traditions, spiritual beliefs, cultures, identities, and life experiences.
- Exceptional emotional intelligence and ability to remain calm, present, and effective during trauma, grief, conflict, medical emergencies, and emotionally intense situations.
- Advanced knowledge of spiritual assessment, crisis intervention, grief and bereavement support, trauma-informed care, end-of-life care, and healthcare ethics.
- Strong understanding of professional boundaries, patient rights, confidentiality, informed consent, and the chaplain's role within an interdisciplinary healthcare team.
- Ability to support individuals who identify with a particular faith tradition as well as those who are spiritual, questioning, nonreligious, or do not wish to receive faith-based services.
- Strong leadership, program-development, volunteer-management, organizational, and relationship-building skills.
- Excellent verbal, written, interpersonal, facilitation, and public-speaking abilities.
- Ability to lead sensitive conversations involving death, dying, grief, withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment, organ donation, family conflict, and ethical decision-making.
- Ability to facilitate trauma debriefings, memorial services, support groups, and spiritual-enrichment activities.
- Sound judgment and the ability to make timely decisions while managing sensitive, confidential, and emotionally complex matters.
- Ability to collaborate effectively with clinical professionals, hospital leaders, employees, community clergy, patients, and families.
- Ability to use the hospital's electronic medical record, communication platforms, office applications, and other systems required to perform the responsibilities of the position.
- Ability to respond to urgent pastoral-care needs and participate in an on-call or emergency-response structure, as required.
Physical Requirements:- Ability to remain standing and walk throughout the hospital for prolonged periods.
- Ability to respond promptly to patient-care areas, including emergency, critical-care, inpatient, and procedural locations.
- Ability to stoop, bend, reach, and occasionally lift or carry materials weighing up to 25 pounds.
- Ability to work in a clinical environment and tolerate exposure to emotionally distressing events, including serious injury, trauma, illness, and death.
The salary range and/or hourly rate listed is a good faith determination of potential base compensation that may be offered to a successful applicant for this position at the time of this job advertisement and can be modified in the future. When determining a team member's base salary and/or rate, several factors may be considered as applicable (e.g., site, specialty, service line, years of relevant experience, education, credentials, negotiated contracts, budget and internal equity).
Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.
The statements herein are intended to describe the general nature and level of work being performed by employees and are not to be construed as an exhaustive list of responsibilities, duties, and skills required of personnel so classified. Furthermore, they do not establish a contract for employment and are subject to change at the discretion of One Brooklyn Health (OBH).
