Practice Stories
Hospital chaplain, UCLA Health · pastoral counselor
A hospital chaplain who learned compassion on his father's hip is now teaching healthcare workers that competence and heart were never supposed to be separate things — and that the right tool, used ethically, can protect both.
Charles Clemens can still describe the walk. His father, a Methodist minister who also drove a bulldozer for a living, would come home from a job site, shave, clean up, and head to Mammoth Medical Center to visit people from the church. Charles, seven or eight years old, walked those hallways beside him.
"I saw compassion at work," Charles says of those visits. "I saw him interacting with doctors and nurses when they would get some news. They would have to bring that news to bear on that patient or family." The people on the other end of that news weren't strangers. "If it was a cafeteria worker who was in the hospital, Sister Jane, or if it was the bus driver, Deacon Bob or who have you, but these were real people facing real challenges in hospital."
He didn't set out to work in healthcare. College brought him toward physical therapy, then other therapeutic paths, and gradually toward clinical work, a master's degree, studies in divinity. Nearly thirty years later, he is a hospital chaplain within the UCLA Health system and a pastoral counselor working with people through grief, trauma, and families affected by suicide.
Ask Charles what's wrong with healthcare today and he doesn't reach for a system diagram. He reaches for a word he picked up from a friend in corporate training: compassion, the kind "that can't be manufactured. You got to have heart for the people." He pairs it with a second word, competence — doing the job well, growing in the craft.
"People can tell if it's something from the heart or if the heart checked out," he says, citing a Forbes statistic on quiet quitting close to half the workforce. "If I'm flying a plane I'd like my pilot to have his heart into it. If I'm going in for a surgery I want that doctor to feel kind of good about what he's doing."
He has also come to recognize what most people get wrong about the men and women he sits with in grief groups and conversations about suicide. "I think one misconception is that people think that it's going to automatically be seen on the outside" when someone is struggling. Working mostly with men, he sees a pattern: guys who "either explode or implode... crash out and they're hurting other people, or implode, they go and hurt themselves." Underneath both, he says, "there's a lot of people suffering in silence. There's a lot of shame around those things of saying I'm broken."
COVID forced the question of reach. Charles began doing grief work over video with people thousands of miles apart — individuals who had lost family members, including one to suicide. "We were able to connect thousands of miles apart to do significant grief work," he says. "This is years ago now and these individuals are growing on thriving." The screen lowered a barrier rather than raising one: "Maybe someone wouldn't go to a group discussion on dealing with grief at the hospital... but they may sign up for a virtual thing because they can do it from their home."
That same instinct — meet people where the barrier is lowest — led him toward AI, not as a philosophy but as a fix for a real problem: staying present in the room. "If I'm having an intense conversation with someone... we begin to talk through how they were raised, how that impacts their thinking. I give them a list of three, four local agencies... we talk about affirmations." Writing all of that mid-conversation used to mean choosing between the notes and the person. Now something else is recording it. "I can go back, pull that data, and I'm able to curate it... that even extends my own reach."
Charles doesn't dodge the harder question — the one healthcare workers ask when they insist there's no place for AI in a people's business. "I'm actually for its ethical use. I'm for it," he says, but he refuses the absolutist framing on either side. His first move with a skeptic: "Are you open to considering another perspective?" His second: ask what they actually mean — replacing people outright, or assisting them the way "prosthetics are an example of things that assist people physically"?
He won't soften the economics underneath the ethics, though. If a device without a personal touch means an organization goes from fifty employees to thirty, he says that's a conversation a company has to have with its values, out loud: "What are our own core values as relates to yes, we need to make a profit, this device can help us to do that." He's watched physicians use these tools to reach patients they'd otherwise push off for months — and watched the same tools, poorly deployed, become an excuse to check out. "Any tool... does it help with that? And that comes back to that individual person, are they treating people from that place?"
His frame, in the end, is not about the technology at all. "AI among many other tools becomes a means and not an end." A means toward what he learned watching his father walk hospital hallways: showing up for people who are real, who are known, who are more than the diagnosis or the data point in front of you.
Charles is careful not to claim more than he knows. He's not speaking for his health system. He doesn't have "all the answers." The larger structural problem — rising costs, people flooding into care they can't afford, a system that "invites us all to be politically active and engaged" — he sets aside as "a whole other discussion," not because it doesn't matter, but because he knows it's bigger than any one tool, any one chaplain, any one conversation. He's made his peace with doing the part in front of him well. The rest, he leaves open.
If you want to hear how a hospital chaplain thinks through the ethics of AI in a people's business — without pretending the hard parts away — watch the full conversation.