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 Providing a resource for professionals, patients and their families regarding end-of-life decisions. |
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Providing a resource for professionals, patients and their families regarding end-of-life decisions. |
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For 24 years Hank has been ministering to patients at the end of their lives and their families. He served for more than twelve years as a full-time nursing home chaplain at the Fairfax Nursing Center and for almost five years as a staff chaplain for the Hospice of Northern Virginia (now Capital Hospice).
Hank is a graduate of the University of Florida with a degree in history and was on football scholarship. He received his Master of Divinity degree from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.
After serving for five years right after seminary in a very traditional church in Macon, Georgia he moved to the Washington, DC area to be a part of the very nontraditional Church of the Saviour. There he was a member of the World Peacemakers mission group. For a year following the move to DC, Hank worked as a carpenter and then for four years directed an inner-city ministry for hard-to-employ people. In 1983 Chaplain Dunn began his healthcare work as a nursing home chaplain.
He is a past president of the Northern Virginia Chapter of the Alzheimer's Association. He has served on the Ethics Committees at Fairfax Nursing Center and the Reston Hospital Center and the Chaplaincy Advisory Board at the Loudoun Hospital Center. He continues to volunteer as a chaplain at Loudoun Hospital and at Joseph's House, a home for formerly homeless men with AIDS in Washington, DC. Hank is a frequent speaker nationally on the topic of making end-of-life decisions and spirituality and healthcare.
To help him explain end-of-life decisions to patients and families, he wrote a booklet to hand to them so they could reflect on the issues discussed. As an afterthought, he sent the book out to other institutions to see if they would be interested in purchasing it for their clients. First published in 1990, Hard Choices for Loving People: CPR, Artificial Feeding, Comfort Care, and the Patient with a Life-Threatening Illness is now in its Fourth Edition, with over 2,000,000 copies sold, and it is being used in more than 5,000 hospitals, nursing homes, faith communities and hospice programs nationwide. His second booklet, Light in the Shadows: Meditations While Living with a Life-Threatening Illness, was released in its second edition in 2005. This is a collection of reflections on the emotional and spiritual concerns at the end of life.
He enjoys backpacking, biking, hiking, fly fishing, kayaking and life in general.