With medical facilities overwhelmed and pandemic restrictions still in place, hospital staff can only do so much to help families through the grief and goodbye process. That's where hospital chaplains step in.
Rev. Rudy Rubio is the chaplain at MLK Community Healthcare in South L.A. He told KPCC's AirTalk that chaplains are crucial to providing spiritual support for both families and stressed health care workers.
"Having to have so many difficult conversations with family at the end of life, withdrawing care, and just multiple family meetings over Zoom and conference calls with interpreters. I found myself doing a lot of interpreting for our doctors as we were having family meetings with the patients' family to update them because most the time to patients were unconscious, on a ventilator."
The coronavirus has taken the lives of nearly 55,000 Californians. More than 500,000 have died nationwide.
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