Loyola’s Chaplain Mentor Program gets to the heart of patient-centered care
January 5, 2026
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Claire Lohman (MD ’29) had been thoroughly prepared for what she would see shadowing chaplain Maria Rego-Herrera on her rounds of Loyola University Medical Center’s oncology and pediatric units.
Even so, the scene Lohman witnessed in the first hospital room she visited came as a shock. In a care unit decorated with balloons, an older man lay in a hospital bed with an assistive speech device at his bedside. He had summoned Rego-Herrera to the room to offer him communion, but when she arrived with a pyx containing a consecrated wafer, it became clear she could not perform the rite safely. The patient had a damaged lower jaw and was unable to chew or swallow.
To honor the patient’s request as faithfully as possible while ensuring his safety, Rego-Herrera asked if he would like a short prayer instead of receiving communion. He typed an affirming reply and, standing by his bedside, she prayed for “God to watch over [the patient],” assist with a speedy recovery, and “help him have better health in the future and to help his family through a difficult time,” Lohman said.
It was a bracing moment, the emotional apogee of Lohman’s two-hour shadowing experience this past October and a striking example of the Ignatian principle of cura personalis, a Latin phrase meaning “personal care” that is commonly interpreted as “care for the whole person.”
“I think oftentimes, as physicians, we’re so focused on getting the patient better that we forget that there are other circumstances going on in the patient’s life,” Lohman said. “This experience really taught me the importance of just sitting with a patient. Even though silence might feel like an uncomfortable thing, it might be the most appropriate thing. To just allow the patient to absorb it and to be there as a comforting presence.”
Going into the ‘deep, dark hole’
Lohman’s experience embodies the type of formative, real-world training Stritch School of Medicine faculty and Health Sciences Campus Ministry leaders hope students will receive in the Chaplain Mentor Program, the only one of its kind among U.S. medical schools.
Launched in the early 1990s, the program is designed to assist students in recognizing the importance of the personal and spiritual dimension of health care by having them spend time with Loyola University Medical Center chaplains, who hold adjunct appointments at the Stritch School of Medicine. All first-year medical students at the Stritch School of Medicine are required to complete the program as part of their two-semester Patient Center Medicine 1 course, which also includes training in conducting standardized patient interviews and performing physical exams.
“We want to train doctors who can feel and who can be in touch with emotions,” said Ann Hillman, director of Health Sciences Campus Ministry. “As a physician, you absolutely have to tough it out sometimes and perform difficult medical tasks like surgeries, but you also need to feel with the patient at appropriate times so that you retain your humanity and you reflect the humanity of someone else.”
It’s very important in our course that students understand that health care is not just balancing numbers and looking at screens and radiology reports, but that there is an indispensable personal quality to someone’s health.
— James Winger, associate professor of Family Medicine at the Stritch School of Medicine
During an hour-long orientation session in the John & Herta Cuneo Center, Diana Durkin, a chaplain in Loyola Medicine’s Spiritual Care and Education Department, told first-year medical students there is no “typical day” for a chaplain. One day they might perform a blessing for a patient undergoing a stem cell transplant. The next day they might console the family members of a patient with gunshot wounds or a grieving mother who experienced a miscarriage. What is important is that they listen closely to patients and families and respond empathically to their needs, whether that means offering prayers, a consoling presence, or a shoulder to cry on.
Particularly at Loyola University Medical Center, a Level 1 Trauma hospital with nine intensive care units, Durkin said, students are likely to witness scenes of abject grief and trauma. She encouraged them to be present during these moments and to lean on chaplains for support and discernment.
“These feelings are the things that inform us in how we’re going to be and how we’re going to treat patients,” she said. “I say this because you will feel, and I’m saying, feel it. Don’t knock it off. Feel it. We’re here to hold each other up. That’s part of Ad majorem Dei gloriam, for the greater glory of God.”
Durkin, an energetic woman who carries two pagers with her to respond to urgent patient requests and emergency calls, emphasized that her role was never to proselytize but to offer accompaniment and companionship for patients in “deep dark holes,” whatever their belief systems.
“We are respectful of everyone and their beliefs or absence of beliefs,” Durkin says. “A God of a name or a God of no name. Whatever spirituality that may be for our staff and for our patients, that’s who we are and that’s what we respect.”
That universalist sentiment is especially poignant for Lohman, who identifies as Catholic. Her desire to become a physician stems from her mother’s non-Hodgkin lymphoma diagnosis when she was a child (the cancer has been treated and is now in remission) and a feeling she was called to help people in similar circumstances. Before medical school, she worked for two years at Stanford University on a CAR T-Cell Therapy clinical trial for cancer treatments. Now, as one of only 175 students accepted into the Stritch School of Medicine’s Class of 2029 from among 13,000 applicants, she is studying to become an oncologist.
“I think seeing [my mother undergo chemotherapy] at a young age and watching physicians care for her with such kindness and care really made me want to share that kindness with other people,” Lohman says. “And I think sharing kindness and love is a big part of Catholicism.”
During her shadowing experience, a visit to the room of a recovering cancer patient who had lost his job during a lengthy hospital stay and faced the prospect of homelessness upon discharge was particularly eye-opening. “He was better, he was being released. But for him being released meant he had nowhere to go and didn’t know what to do next,” Lohman said.
That’s where Rego-Herrera came in. As in all her patient interactions, she began by calmly asking the person what he wanted from the encounter—in this case, social service support, which she promptly summoned to his room.
“We talked about how chaplains are really there to just be present for the really challenging moments in patients’ lives. And they have the ability to empathize with patients and elicit information from patients that, maybe, doctors aren’t always able to get,” she said.
Empathic care improves health outcomes
James Winger, an associate professor of Family Medicine at the Stritch School of Medicine who teaches the Patient Centered Medicine 1 course, notes that empathic communication—a two-way, receptive form of interaction that chaplains are trained to employ effectively—has been linked to improved health outcomes.
For instance, in a study of 1470 adults with chronic low back pain, researchers at the University of North Texas Health Science Center found that patients treated by very empathetic physicians indicated better outcomes than those treated by less empathic physicians, including reporting less pain, fewer back disabilities, and a better quality of life. Moreover, in a 2014 study, Regina Conway-Phillips (MSN ’94, PhD ’11), a retired professor at the Loyola University Chicago Marcella Niehoff School of Nursing, found care providers’ attention to spirituality at the bedside is correlated with the decision of African American women to undergo screening for breast cancer.
“It’s very important in our course that they understand that health care is not just balancing numbers and looking at screens and radiology reports, but that there is an indispensable personal quality to someone’s health,” Winger said.
Of course, doctors are not typically trained as chaplains, and the program helps students identify situations—particularly when patients and families are coming to terms with terminal diagnoses or making end-of-life care decisions—in which requesting a chaplain for additional support can be beneficial, not just to support patients, but also to assist care providers who bear witness to wrenching scenes that raise deep, existential questions.
Each student cohort begins the program with an orientation introducing them to the duties of chaplains, who are required to have a theological background—a Master of Arts in Pastoral Studies or Master of Divinity degree—and receive board certification from a licensing body such as the Association of Professional Chaplains (APC). Following their shadowing experience, students write a short narrative essay or create an artistic representation of their experience and discuss what they observed in a small group session led by a Campus Ministry team member.
Puneet Kaler (MD ’29) who identifies as Sikh and whose interest in neurology was deeply influenced by his experience with his grandparents’ Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, says the program is one of the main reasons he enrolled at the Stritch School of Medicine. “Here I felt like I could truly follow my mission and my purpose in life, which revolves around taking care of people, but doing it in a way that matters to them, that leaves an impact in their lives,” Kaler said.
In October, he shadowed Michael Hayes, a chaplain in Loyola Medicine’s Spiritual Care and Education Department, on a two-hour night shift starting at 9 p.m. that included 10-15 minute visits in several of the hospital’s intensive care units. In one room, Kaler watched as Hayes interacted with a patient preparing for an arterial stent to be surgically installed. The ostensibly effortless way Hayes mirrored the patient’s emotional state is something he hopes to emulate in his bedside manner as a physician.
“It’s important, of course, to guide people towards better health, but it’s also important to make a personal connection with them and to sit down and talk to them,” he said, “Just to take a few minutes out of our day as humans, as people, to be there for them and show them that we really do care about them. That they’re not just a statistic; they’re not just a number.”
