Papal exhortation Q and A 2 Mercy genetic screening tool 4 Executive changes 11 PERIODICAL RATE PUBLICATION
NOVEMBER 2025 VOLUME 41, NUMBER 11
Indiana physician at Ascension hospital focuses on spiritual care in retirement
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By JULIE MINDA
Faith and medicine long have been central throughlines of Dr. Tony Schapker’s life. He says from the start of his 40-year medical career, he recognized the critical importance of spirituality to healing. But it is only now, as a volunteer in retirement, that he has been able to invest significant time and energy into learning how best to provide pastoral care to people in his Southern Indiana community. Throughout his time at what is now Ascension St. Vincent in Evansville, Schapker was intentional not just about advancing his skills as a physician but also about forming himself in his Catholic faith and
the delivery of spiritual care in different departments in the hospital, I could see that people felt they were receiving better care when their spiritual
Dr. Tony Schapker prepares to enter a patient’s room at Ascension St. Vincent, where he retired from practicing medicine. He remains a volunteer Eucharistic minister at the hospital in Evansville, Indiana.
Photo courtesy of the San Antonio Department of Human Services
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As I have witnessed
— Dr. Tony Schapker
Dignity Health clinic staffer honored for helping woman escape sex trafficker By JULIE MINDA
SAN ANTONIO — There are many organizations in San Antonio — the nation’s seventh largest city — that long have been working to address the needs of its homeless population of more than 3,000. But community and civic leaders grew concerned more than a decade ago that the community organizations’ responses were often disconnected, uncoordinated and sometimes duplicative, so collaboratives have formed to help ensure a more efficient and effective response. CHRISTUS
A Sacramento, California, mom who was being trafficked for sex escaped the abuse due largely to the intervention of a staff member of the Dignity Health Medical Safe Haven clinic, part of CommonSpirit Health. Since then, the woman has helped secure her abuser’s conviction, and she is rebuilding her life with her two small children. Courtney Martin is deputy district attorney with the Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office, which gave the clinic staffer, Gigi Barrios, an award earlier this year for her actions. Martin credits the trafficker’s conviction to how well Barrios and the Medical Safe Barrios Haven, along with law enforcement and the court system, worked together. That successful collaboration, Martin says, “is reflected in the relationships that Gigi builds with human trafficking victims and with the organizations that help them. The victim knew Gigi and trusted her, and she knew Gigi was safe.”
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Rebekah Valdez, left, a clinical outreach coordinator with the San Antonio Homeless Services and Strategy Department, follows up with a client.
Through collaboratives, CHRISTUS Santa Rosa helps ensure unhoused people get health care
needs were addressed.”
By JULIE MINDA
SSM Health and regional partners work to ease vulnerable patients’ access to specialty care
Avera doctor who has a son with Down syndrome serves families at clinic focused on the disorder
By JULIE MINDA
By VALERIE SCHREMP HAHN
Representatives of multiple health care facilities serving the safety net population in St. Louis say that working together through the St. Louis Integrated Health Network has helped them to coordinate specialty care effectively. And this in turn has enabled them to address the health care
needs of marginalized people in a patientcentered way. SSM Health is part of the network. Dr. Saida Kent, a hospitalist with SSM Health Saint Louis University Hospital, said the network is a great resource for directing her patients to the help they need. She said that most of her patients are Continued on 7
In St. Louis, SSM Health partners with other providers to assess and address barriers. PAGE 7
Sixteen years ago, Dr. Jennifer Tegethoff didn’t know her son Aaron would be born with Down syndrome. But on the evening of his birth, after a difficult day of grasping the fact that he had the disorder, she went over to the warmer in the nursery to hold his tiny hand. In her head, she heard what she believed was God’s voice saying: “This is my plan,
girl, not yours.” “It was a wake-up moment,” Tegethoff recalled. “I remember thinking, this is going to be OK.” Tegethoff, a pediatrician in Mitchell, South Dakota, is one of the co-founders of the Avera Down Syndrome Clinic, which she runs with another pediatrician, Dr. Christiane Maroun. The clinic opened in 2014 and operates Continued on 8