Pastoral Care
Does the date April 2, 2014 mean anything to most of us? Probably not. But to Ted Decker, this is the day his mom went to the hospital. Unfortunately, we don't know anything about how the Pastoral Care team at The Rock Solid Church continued to follow up with Ted. Fortunately, that story can be different at your church with a little help from the the Pastoral Care package! This package contains a handful of blocks and workflows (that you can customize) to keep track of hospital visitations, nursing home residents, and homebound members and attendees of your church.
When the plugin is initially installed, a Pastoral Care option will be available in the "Installed Plugins" section in Rock's "Admin Tools" section.
You will need to add new Hospitals and Nursing Homes for the dropdown menus, those will be entered as Defined Types. In Rock, go to the Toolbox -> General Settings -> Defined Types. In that list you should see “Hospitals” and “Nursing Homes”. If you edit those Defined Types you can add values for all your applicable organizations for your church.
As an administrator, you will probably want to move this into a more permanent location within Rock. The first page is the menu page for the Pastoral Care plugin and looks like this:
The following 2 screenshots show how you would enter data for a new hospitalization/nursing home resident:
As a point of clarification, the "Requested by" field is for capturing a Rock person and will default to the current staff member or volunteer who is logged in and entering the request into Rock. "Notified By" is a free form text field to be used to help specify who called the church to report it. Often when a hospitalization or nursing home resident is reported to the church it will be reported by a family member, friend, or possibly a staff member of the facility. Often those people are not actually in Rock or you might not catch all their information so this lets you enter whatever you need to enter in the field.
The next two screenshots show the dashboard entries for Hospitalizations and Homebound people:
This is an example of how an existing hospitalization entry would appear if you clicked it to edit it. It gives the person a couple actions. Editing the request would show a pre-populated form similar to the “Add Hospitalization” above. Add visit gives a small form that allows for entering the person who visited, the date they visited, and any notes.
This is a new tab on a person’s record. It shows any pastoral care entries in the past including completed ones:
Hopefully that’s enough information to help get you started!