SAN FRANCISCO: On Monday, October 29, Sikh minister S.S. Sat Kartar Khalsa-Ramey was installed as the Director of Hospital Chaplaincy and Clinical Pastoral Education for the California Pacific Medical Center here.The installation took place in the Medical Center's Enright Room. The California Pacific Medical Center is one of the largest private, not-for-profit, academic medical centers in Northern California.

It provides a wide variety of services, including acute, post-acute and outpatient hospital care; home care and hospice services; preventive and complementary care and health education. The Medical Center comprises four oldest hospitals in the city of San Francisco. In becoming Director of Hospital Chaplaincy and Clinical Pastoral Education for the California Pacific Medical Center, Sat Kartar Khalsa - Ramey assumes a tremendous responsibility to care and provide for the spiritual needs of the patients who are treated through the Medical Center. "It's been my blessing to serve in hospital settings since the early 1980s," said Sat Kartar.

"All of this training comes down to one thing - seeing God in all. Listening from the inner ear to those cries, and being able to be with a person at the most vulnerable time in his or her life." Though Sat Kartar Khalsa-Ramey has been in her current position for nine months, the installation marks a very special commitment of service. "An installation is considered an important event that recognizes the commitment to a particular service by an individual.

That commitment is supported by the person's religious tradition and the leadership of the institution that's being served. In this sense, it's a partnership that supports that intended service. That's what makes it so great." As Director of Hospital Chaplaincy and Clinical Pastoral Education, Sat Kartar Khalsa-Ramey oversees an approach to health-care that integrates body, mind and spirit. "What makes this position unique is that I am within the Department of the Institute for Health and Healing where spirituality and medicine come together at the bedside for the patient," she said.

"Care and comfort at the bedside is very important. When people are hospitalized, they can feel stressed and overwhelmed. The California Pacific Medical Center has made a promise of providing excellent care that goes 'beyond medicine.' This excellent care embraces the body, mind, spirit and emotions of a person. It's very inclusive."

One of the key issues when it comes to Hospital Chaplaincy and Pastoral Education is how to provide emotional and spiritual support for a person - regardless of the particular faiths of the patients and the chaplain. Sat Kartar Khalsa-Ramey explained the approach as being very patient-focused and supportive.

"Clinical pastoral education is a field of study that helps individuals from different religious traditions learn to minister to people at the bedside," she explained. "It is in that field that they get to utilize their theology and their self-knowledge. Everything they ever learned comes together for the good of the patient. It is patient oriented. It's not proselytizing.

It is about knowing the essence of your religious tradition and bringing your well-spring of love forward to serve a person who is in distress." As a Sikh, Sat Kartar takes her own inspiration from a Sikh soldier who lived hundreds of years ago named Bhai Kanhaiya. On the battlefield, Bhai Kanhaiya would share water and give medicine to whoever had fallen in battle - no matter what side or whose army the soldier belonged to. It is this spirit of serving all people that Sat Kartar incorporates into her work as a chaplain.