Close-Up spotlights Sharon Stanton of the Center for Faith Health Ministries

Chandler, AZ – As our current approach to healthcare has oriented itself more toward the bottom line, its initial intention has been lost. There’s a need for a new approach that brings faith back into the way we treat patients.

Sharon Stanton is the founder and manager of Dignity Health’s Center for Faith Health Ministries, which seeks to integrate faith and a belief in a creator into our approach to healthcare.

“This work of Faith Health Ministry is multi-faith movement that is faith-based and community-centered,” says Stanton. "We provide professional nurses with mentoring, bonding and direction. We seek to instill a vision and mission of healing brokenness through incorporating a team of trained lay health ministers to foster engagement with faith community members."

Like traditional nursing, Faith Community Nursing is focused on the intentional care of the spirit. What makes this specialty different is the conscious partnering of health issues with the faith of the patient and patient’s family. A faith community nurse seeks to foster physical, emotional, spiritual, and social harmony leading to healthy and healing relationships with God, family, faith communities, culture and creation.

According to Stanton, if you have a faith community and a health system bonded in a covenant, an individual who needs acute or urgent care attention can return to their community in a seamless transition.

“This isn’t about nursing,” explains Stanton. “It’s about raising the consciousness of a congregation to understand they have an accountability to be healthier in all aspects of life. We take the practice of nursing and integrate it with ministry to heal a person or community that is broken. If we do this right, we will impact American healthcare for generations.”