Winter 2023 | Volume 104, Number 1
JOHN O. MUDD, JD, JSD, and JOHN SHEA, STD
In Catholic health care, an ever-changing workforce can present new opportunities to enhance and preserve its identity and culture. This endeavor — to tie one's calling with the ministry's mission — can, however, invite new challenges, especially when welcoming staff with increasingly diverse backgrounds that are both religious and nonreligious. Those who regularly encounter this dynamic know it has no easy resolution.
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FR. JOSEPH J. DRISCOLL, DMin
He's 50 years old. It's the 1960s. A white Catholic priest is sent as pastor to St. John-St. Hugh's Church in Roxbury, a small Black Catholic community in Boston's inner city. He remembers well the hot summer day when his Baptist neighbors across the street invited him to their porch for a tall glass of cold lemonade.
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KELLY BILODEAU
Alisahah Jackson, MD, is the first president of the new Lloyd H. Dean Institute for Humankindness & Health Justice at CommonSpirit Health. She stepped into this role in November 2022 after serving as CommonSpirit's vice president of population health innovation and policy. As part of her mission to improve health equity, she helped to establish the system's Vulnerable Populations Council. This interdisciplinary executive leadership group is improving care by creating initiatives to address social determinants of health and to support vulnerable patients across the organization. The 25-member group coordinates with the Vulnerable Populations Care Collaborative, an assemblage of clinical leaders who put these strategic plans into use across the organization, which includes more than 1,000 care sites and 140 hospitals in 21 states.
Health Progress recently spoke with Jackson about the council and its goal of promoting quality care.
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PUKAR RATTI, CIM, CCRP, FACMPE AND STEVEN J. SQUIRES, PhD, MEd
Those who don't do clinical research in Catholic health care settings may hope a program can grow "despite" its faith-based setting. Those of us who do this work in faith-based organizations realize these settings can be truly beneficial and structured to allow ethical and significant research programs to grow and thrive. At the CHRISTUS Institute for Innovation and Advanced Clinical Care, we infuse Catholic identity, Church teaching and mission — along with federal regulations and clinical research operations — into all of the institute's operational processes. The impact of this integration goes far beyond regulatory compliance for those involved in CHRISTUS Health's nearly 700 active clinical studies and more than 10,000 participants.
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MARTIN SCHREIBER, EdD
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated a reimagination of our current models of health care and intensified the focus on health equity for those who are poor and vulnerable, while bringing with it a cadre of additional and complex leadership challenges. Successful leadership in this age of health care requires a renewed leadership focus on mission, purpose and vision, along with updated strengths and skills to best advance the healing ministry of Jesus.
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SARAH REDDIN, D.HCML
Health care's internal pressures and external headwinds are numerous and complex. Certainly, patient care remains at the core, but in various roles leaders and team members must consider factors as broad as employee engagement and retention, health equity, pandemic trauma and fatigue, and much more.
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FR. CHARLES BOUCHARD, OP, STD
Despite significant progress in our understanding, we are still asking some of the same questions about identity, authority and competence related to sponsorship — the structured relationships through which the sponsor, in the name of the Church, directs and influences the Catholic health care ministry. I would like to sketch the history of sponsorship in recent decades and pose some questions for the ministry to consider regarding these relationships moving forward.
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BISHOP JOHN STOWE, OFM Conv.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishop's fall release of the culmination of synodal listening sessions held in dioceses across the country, titled National Synthesis of the People of God in the United States of America for the Diocesan Phase of the 2021-2023 Synod, reveals a common set of themes that are on the hearts and minds of American Catholics.1 People everywhere — including myself as experienced during our sessions held in the Diocese of Lexington — were surprised by the vast agreement discovered when they actually listened and heard from each other. They learned not only about their common love for the Church, but also a similar desire to see it flourish and to be an effective sacrament of God's presence in the world.
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FEATURE
ALEXANDER GARZA, MD
SSM Health Chief Community Health Officer and COVID-19 Incident Commander of St. Louis Metropolitan Pandemic Task Force
As the story goes, a businessman was walking home from work one evening. He noticed another man on his hands and knees under a streetlight, searching frantically for something. Feeling pity for the man, the businessman put his briefcase down and joined the searcher, asking him, "Can I help you? What are you looking for?"
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