Elderly at Home Initiative.
The Page Trust has gifted us $10,000.00 to explore the feasibility of a Pastoral Care Worker for the Elderly at Home Initiative.
The lead group on this project has been Kathleen Field, Catholic Hospital Chaplain, Sande Ramage, Palmerston North Hospital Pastoral/Spiritual Care Team Leader and Fr Joe Grayland.
The Goals:
1. To test if a pastoral worker with a healthcare perspective is feasible in our Cathedral and Lourdes parishes.
2. To select and train a small group of volunteers who will do home-visiting with spiritual care and are willing to assist people navigate the health system.
3. To record the process and analyse its value and future options.
4. Record the value of these visits through surveys and feedback and produce a report for the Page Trust.
5. To decide the future options for this role and if feasible, seek funding for an ongoing ministry.
Vision:
The vision is to produce a report to decide the project’s feasibility and future financing, we will create a project/leadership group to run the pilot programme and monitor progress.
Our hope is to rebuild our home-visiting pastoral outreach throughout the parishes and invite new people into this ministry to the Elderly at Home.
How we will do this:
We will appoint a person to facilitate this project and provide him or her with support through the parishes.
This role will be a leadership role for volunteers.
Volunteers
1. The volunteers would receive training in pastoral/ spiritual care visits.
2. The volunteers would receive training in health care system navigation.
3. The volunteers would receive guidance in pastoral reflection processes and support.
4. Kotahi Ano would manage volunteers.
Administration:
1. Locate the facilitator in the Pastoral Team.
2. Provide computer and phone support.
3. Provide a small stipend and mileage amount.
4. Use the Kotahi Ano police check process, volunteer policy, management and code of conduct.
Ecumenical:
1. We would like to link this process to another Christian Church parish and make it about the people we visit
Hospital Link
1. We want to link this ministry to the hospital and provide spiritual care to those leaving the hospital.
Research:
1. The facilitator will have to establish a research aspect of the project.
2. The research aspect will include recording visits and pastoral training of volunteers.
3. Financial records will be kept to assess the cost of the initiative
4. We hope at the end to write up the project for publication.
This is the basic outline of the way ahead. The start time would be sometime this year (excluding December 2022 and January 2023 ) and concluding in October 2023.