Salus Forum December 3, 2025

This forum is the sixteenth in the Salus Health Care Forum series, and second in the current set of forums It was convened on December 3, 2025. In attendance were William Bergquist, Jeremy Fish, Bill Gillanders, Walt Mills, Jeff Smith, Mark Vukalcic, and Jack Westfall. The Trigger topic for this forum was provided by Dr. Westfall who offered his observations on the role played by (or potentially played by) the clergy in contemporary health care systems. Accompanying his observations were considerations of the dimension of spirituality in the domain of health care.

The following narrative is derived from the Salus Forum discussion:

Jack

I grew up in a church. My dad was a pastor. My three sisters are ordained pastors. The sister who was just a bit older than me had started working at a church on the Upper West Side of New York City. And it was in the early to mid-eighties. HHIV was just emerging as a big deal. And New York City was one of the epicenters.

Her church was a Presbyterian church that had a large LGBT community that were members of the church. Quite a few of them developed HIV infections and AIDS and died. She was a pastor and I was a medical student. You know, the magic of your first day of medical school is you get a white coat and a stethoscope. And everybody thinks you know everything. So, she would call me when I was starting my first year of medical school at the University of Kansas. She would say, Hey, what’s Kaposi’s sarcoma? Hey, what’s histoplasmosis? Hey, what’s this HIV thing about anyway? And so, I very quickly started reading everything I could. And I would give her information.

At the time, there were no gay spouses. You weren’t allowed to get married. And so, when her parishioners would go into the hospital, their spouse wasn’t necessarily able to visit them. Even in New York City, a pretty progressive city, there were still, and you guys all remember this, there were still lots of hospitals where a significant other was not allowed to visit or certainly not in the intensive care unit. And certainly not to be part of a conversation with the physician or clinical team. The pastor was allowed in. So, my sister Mary became the conduit by which information flowed from a patient who had HIV to the patient’s spouse or significant other. And so, she and I started thinking about this book that would help inform clergy about some of the basics of healthcare. And so, we started this in 1986.