Thank you for your interest in the Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) program at UCSF Medical Center and UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital in San Francisco.

Our CPE program is a full-time commitment that requires at least 40 hours of on-site involvement each week.  The normal workdays are Monday through Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.  However, every chaplain student serves as the duty chaplain once every seven to ten days (including weekends), which includes sleeping overnight in the hospital and providing 24 hours of continuous coverage to all areas of the hospital. A typical day begins with all chaplains meeting for a morning reflection and report time. The next five to six hours of the day are unstructured so that the CPE students can be involved in the life of the clinical areas that they will be serving as chaplains—providing spiritual care to our patients, their families and loved ones, and physicians, employees, and students who work in the Medical Center. In the afternoon the CPE students participate in a variety of group learning activities, including times where students present written recollections of their conversations with patients (verbatim seminars), covenant group sessions where students are encouraged to debrief their clinical work and explore how their personal experiences and relationships with colleagues affect their care of others, and didactic seminars where specialists present material on topics relevant to healthcare chaplaincy in a diverse urban setting. There is individual supervision with one of the CPE supervisory faculty members weekly. Each unit students write a goals statement, at least five pastoral reports (verbatims), a mid-unit and a final self-evaluation, and other materials as assigned. Reading is assigned as needed.