The Challenges Facing Small, Aging US Women's Religious Institutes with Limited Resources: Findings from Two Focus Groups

Abstract

The Challenges Facing Small, Aging US Women's Religious Institutes with Limited Resources:Findings from Two Focus Groups Jonathon L. Wiggins and Thomas P. Gaunt SJ In February, 2021, Support Our Aging Religious! (SOAR!, a non-profit organization that raises funds and provides grant to aid Catholic religious institutes care for elderly and infirm members) engaged CARA—the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University—to study the challenges that small, aging US women's religious institutes with limited resources face, as well as to discover what solutions the institutes can envision to those challenges. To investigate these topics, CARA conducted two focus groups with major superiors and/or other leaders from such women's religious institutes. This report summarizes the findings from both focus groups. Summary of Findings Findings related to the two most commonly discussed topics among focus group participants—providing for the general wellbeing of their congregations' aging sisters and financing the needs of members—are summarized below. Providing for the General Wellbeing of their Aging and Ailing Members The most common challenges mentioned by leaders are those related to providing for the general wellbeing of their aging and ailing members. The four areas of greatest challenge are: • Providing quality health care to sisters • Finding facilities where ailing sisters can reside • Providing quality mental health care for sisters • Meeting their sisters' emotional and spiritual needs [End Page 223] All participating congregations provide care for their sisters in one of their own facilities, but most say they need to send sisters to an outside facility once the level of care is beyond what they can provide. Not coincidentally, the greatest number of challenges mentioned by leaders concern the provision of care within their congregations, with leaders especially likely to find the following problematic: • Having a hodgepodge of often-untrained sisters and health care personnel (who need to be identified and engaged by the congregation) trying to provide quality wellness care for sisters in what is often an unlicensed unit; especially challenging are meeting the needs of those sisters suffering from dementia • Leaders still having to place the sisters in another facility once they reach a certain point of care beyond the congregation's capacity for care; if the other facility does not allow patients to remain there in different phases of illness, the leaders may need to later locate another facility for the sisters' nursing or hospice care • Members who are sent elsewhere for care are often placed in separate facilities and feel isolated; further, active sisters and family members find it difficult to be present and support their ailing members in multiple locations • Handling the stress that providing care in-house puts on the leaders and other members to provide quality care, especially when the care needs to be 24 hours a day and members must accompany ailing sisters to doctors' appointments and emergency room visits • Affording the care, with congregations having to provide quality health care personnel for sisters' 24-hour care, often not having adequate insurance/Medicare coverage for care provided, and coping with the unpredictable nature of the health care costs that arise Besides providing in-house care, two other models of care are most frequently used by congregations: (1) placing sisters in secular care units and (2) placing them in religiously affiliated care units. Both have advantages over inhouse care in terms of the quality of health care services delivered, but leaders report that sisters are reluctant to be moved into these facilities as they likely will no longer be able to live in community with their sisters. Further: • Secular units often do not offer as much in the way of meeting sisters' psychological, social, emotional, and spiritual needs as the congregations' in-house care does. • Religiously affiliated units provide similar quality of care to secular facilities, but are better at meeting the sisters' emotional, psychological, and spiritual needs. [End Page 224] Leaders suggested the following solutions for addressing the challenges listed above: • Hiring the right personnel to assist leaders and care for members • Having all of their ailing sisters in one facility, from assisted care to hospice care • Collaborating with other congregations for a shared residential care...