Health progress (Saint Louis, Mo.)最新文献

I met him in the lobby of a large hotel in the Midwest as we were waiting for the doors to open to a panel discussion of health care experts. I noticed his name tag and recognized his Catholic health care system immediately. We had a common network. I introduced myself and discovered he was the system’s chief financial officer. We were having a pleasant chat when I asked him about his system's foundation.

There is an ethical issue closely related to philanthropy that also is a core value for many Catholic health care systems and included in the “Shared Statement of Identity for the Catholic Health Care Ministry.”¹ That value is stewardship. Some have suggested that “stewardship is the recurring theme in the Catholic social tradition that speaks most clearly to how and why people should care about the commons.”² Yet, it would actually be difficult to find the term stewardship mentioned at all in the Catholic social tradition.³ And often in the more general literature (and likely in the minds of many in health care), stewardship has been limited to the notion of good financial management.

Philanthropy and community benefit have been closely related since the earliest days of health care. Religious and civic founders of the first nursing homes and hospitals received support from generous members of the community offering financial and volunteer resources. The connection remains today.

Charlie and A.J. Poole were 10 and 9 years old in 2013 when their grandmother, Helen Pomakoy, moved in with them. Her Alzheimer’s had been getting worse, and the boys’ mother, Sara, decided that bringing her to their McLean, Virginia, home was the best option.

The son of Irish immigrant parents, Bob Healey grew up during the Great Depression, and he remembers what it was like to be poor. “When you’re poor, you never forget that,” he said, describing how he wore pieces of cardboard in his shoes to cover the holes. It was this upbringing, along with his strong Catholic faith, that led the 87-year-old down a path of hard work and generosity.

Nearly 20 years ago, Fr. Richard McCormick, SJ, PhD, asked if Catholic health care could live out its mission in the current health care environment, which, at the time, he described as having the following characteristics: medicine as business, depersonalized care, cuts in Medicare and Medicaid, impoverished public hospitals, rampant mergers and competition, obsolescence of the hospital and threatened pastoral care.¹ I wrote an article reflecting on McCormick’s question and ended it, unlike McCormick himself, by expressing hope that mission was still possible for us within Catholic health care despite the various challenges.² Looking back on that article with the wisdom of hindsight, I am, paradoxically, more and less hopeful today than I was at the time. Let me explain and attempt to offer some constructive comments as well.

There is no greater act of kindness than that of giving back, and of the many ways to give back, philanthropy is critical to health care. Dignity Health relies on philanthropic support to help it to grow and to move its hospitals and communities from good to great.

In Laudato Si', Pope Francis calls on us to pay attention to our social fabric, the community and social structures that sustain us. To combat social anonymity, antisocial behavior and violence, the Holy Father invites us to "weave bonds of belonging and togetherness … into an experience of community," calling on us to promote ways to "increase our sense of belonging, of rootedness, of 'feeling at home' within a city which includes us and brings us together."1

The next fast-spreading infectious threat to community health is out there somewhere. Maybe it is deplaning from a long international flight with a host, ready to cut loose in an ill-monitored microbial haven where it can grow stronger, resist an antibiotic defense, then fan out in meandering, unpredictable attack.