Chaplains now provide spiritual support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week

Spiritual Care team expands – office hours, too

Salem Health’s Spiritual Team is growing! Team office hours are now Monday through Friday 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. We hope these extended office hours will allow us to respond quicker to requests and avoid any delay for patients, families and staff needs.

The team has two new members. Dr. Yongbom Lee and Dr. Darla Tillman Samuelson. Chaplain Yongbom Lee is from South Korea. He has a Ph.D. in theology. He taught religion in several institutions and worked for two Korean American churches, before pursuing Clinical Pastoral Education. Prior to joining Salem Health, Yongbom did CPE residency at the University of Virginia Health System and Virginia Commonwealth University Health System.

Chaplain Darla (pronouns: she, her, hers) comes to us from the VA in Portland Oregon where she worked with palliative care, geriatrics and mental health. Prior to training as a chaplain, Darla worked in theological education. Her graduate research was on emotion regulation in leaders and recently she has found meaning in Carl Jung’s philosophical and spiritual writings.  Darla loves to spend her free time with her dog Mumu, as well as backpacking, trail running and gardening.

The Spiritual Care Team is actively working to create even more innovative ways to integrate the spiritual care services within each of the Salem Health Teams. By enhancing the referral system and improving the documentation process to allow more time spent with patients and staff support. The team will also be conducting chaplain daily rounding in units, to help identify more opportunities and provide a more rapid responses to requests for their services.

We appreciate everyone’s feedback to help us innovate and use continuous improvement principles to serve our organization. We appreciate all your support to help make these change a positive success for everyone.