The Oncology Chaplain has special skills in assisting you and your family to draw on your particular spiritual resources for healing. Spiritual care is offered in response to spiritual needs such as love, hope, trust, forgiveness, and meaning, as well as to religious ritual needs. Using the language and framework of meaning of the other person, whether religious or secular, the chaplain seeks to enable the person to identify and draw on her/his own spiritual strengths in facing present circumstances. Spiritual care of patients/families is always done in collaboration with the multidisciplinary care team.

Service is available to persons of all faiths and to those with no religious affiliation.

For more information go to: Chaplaincy Services at MGH

Meet our Oncology Chaplain, Katrina Scott, M.Div.

I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to join the interdisciplinary health-care team in the Cancer Center.  As Oncology Chaplain, my goal is to support and nourish the spiritual resources of patients and families throughout their cancer experience.  As a daughter and a spouse of cancer patients, I have come to appreciate the special circumstances of living with and negotiating the limitations of illness while trying to keep a sense of self.

A holistic approach to healing calls for total care of the body, including our mind, heart and spirit.  Life-altering concerns are at the heart of many health issues, especially after diagnosis:

• Why am I ill?  
• How will I cope?  

Spirituality and religion speak to these questions of meaning, our desire to understand how it is we fit into life. 

Each person has their own experience of cancer, and spiritual care involves supporting a patient’s/family’s beliefs, which may include following a particular religion, having a relationship with a higher power or simple wonder at life’s mysteries. 

I am honored to join the Cancer Center, where compassionate care leads to a human connection, where healing and hope are possible each day.