Heather Shortlidge ('01) Finds Pediatric Hospital Chaplaincy Work Challenging, Rewarding

Heather Shortlidge visits a teenage patient at Children's Medical Center, Dallas.

On any given day during the last year Heather Shortlidge (’01) could be found sitting on the floor laughing and playing with pediatric cancer patients. Or counseling hospital staff who had had an emotionally draining shift. Or performing an emergency baptism in the intensive care unit on a child who wasn’t expected to live.

Shortlidge (’01) would never have guessed that four years after graduating from University of Richmond she would have been ministering to sick and injured children and their families as a hospital chaplain at Children’s Medical Center in Dallas, Texas. To the contrary, the leadership studies major anticipated a lucrative business career.  

By the spring of her senior year, Shortlidge had lined up a great job at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., for the summer and had accepted an enticing job offer from Accenture, a management consulting firm, to start in the fall. But then University chaplain David Burhans called. 

Burhans told Shortlidge that Salisbury Presbyterian, a Richmond-area church, was offering a scholarship aimed at recruiting a college student to a career in the ministry by providing free tuition, room and board for the first year of seminary. “Heather has always had a sense of the sacred,” Burhans said. “She finds meaning in thinking about moral and spiritual issues.” He thought she’d be an ideal candidate for the scholarship. 

Shortlidge wasn’t so sure. She opted to pursue her original post-graduation plans instead. “But I kept thinking about Dr. Burhans’ suggestion,” she said. “I couldn’t believe someone would pay for me to go to school. In the end, my decision to go to seminary was a God thing.” 

Shortlidge put her Accenture job on hold and arrived at Union Theological Seminary, a Presbyterian school in Richmond, Va., two days into orientation. “It was a rocky beginning,” she said, “but I stayed and loved it.” 

The scholarship provided by the local church covered the first year of her schooling, and Union awarded her a full scholarship for the last two years. Shortlidge knew she wanted to work with children, so following her graduation from seminary, she accepted a one-year appointment as a hospital chaplain at Children’s Medical Center in Dallas, Texas, one of the nation’s top pediatric hospitals.  

The hospital treats children for a variety of conditions, including trauma, cancer, cystic fibrosis and diabetes. Shortlidge ministered to the affected children as well as to their families and the staff members who cared for them.  

“Any time a child gets sick,” Shortlidge said, “the whole family goes into crisis. When a child is diagnosed with cancer, for example, the family doesn’t have much time to transition. One day life is normal and the next day it is totally different.” 

“So I would tell the family that they now had a new ‘normal,’ a normal which would include bringing their child to the hospital for weekly blood counts and chemotherapy treatments and watching their child get sick,” she said. However, the good news, according to Shortlidge, is that treatment options have increased significantly during the past 10 years.  

Despite the emotional intensity of the job, Shortlidge loved it. “There wasn’t a typical day in the hospital,” she said, “and that was part of what was exciting about it.”  

When she worked on-call shifts, she was the only chaplain in the hospital. During a 24-hour shift Shortlidge responded to all codes, traumas and deaths. She spent the majority of her daytime hours listening, building relationships, troubleshooting the complexities of the health-care system and providing much-needed spiritual and emotional support to patients and their families. 

Children’s Medical Center serves patients from diverse socio-economic and religious backgrounds. It’s important to minister to every family that comes in, regardless of their faith, or in some cases, lack of faith, Shortlidge said.  

“My job was not to overtake their faith,” she said, “but to supplement it. When families walked through the front doors, the hospital became their world, and I needed to figure out how I could accommodate their needs within that setting.”  

Shortlidge also had to figure out how to maintain her own sense of equilibrium in such a setting. “You make sure you work with colleagues who support you and who you can talk to,” she said.  

She met with the hospital’s other chaplains for an hour and a half each day for an educational seminar, which included time for discussion of difficult cases and personal issues. “We tried to be very intentional with each other,” Shortlidge said. “If someone was covering a death, we checked in with them during the process and followed up with them afterwards. It was also important to have friends in the community outside the hospital.” 

Shortlidge believes her education prepared her well for hospital chaplaincy work. “Seminary gave me the tools to articulate my faith and let me have conversations with others about their faith journey,” she said. “It also taught me a lot about tolerance and respect for other faiths and how people grieve differently.”  

Her Jepson experience also proved beneficial. “Jepson taught me how to work in groups with people I didn’t necessarily pick,” Shortlidge said. “I learned how to be a part of a team of people with a wide variety of learning styles and belief systems.”  

Shortlidge referred to the hospital’s team of chaplains to illustrate her point: her colleagues included a Polish nun, a Polish priest, a Southern Baptist minister and a Hispanic Catholic deacon. “I was the youngest chaplain by 15 years, one of only two Protestants in the group and the most liberal in terms of my theology,” she said. But despite these differences, she and her colleagues functioned effectively as a team. 

Shortlidge just completed her one-year appointment at Children’s Medical Center in mid-September, and she has begun interviewing with various Presbyterian churches around the country. She plans on serving as an associate pastor for a few years before entering a Ph.D. program, she said.  

She will go wherever she is called. “Jepson really nurtured my sense of flexibility and gave me the confidence to go halfway across the country to Texas with my first job,” Shortlidge said. 

She also recalled the mentoring she received from Burhans while she was a student at University of Richmond. “I really credit Dr. Burhans with my decision to become a minister,” she said. “He saw something in me I didn’t see in myself.”