Since the summer of 2007, the Palliative Care Team at John H. Stroger, Jr. Hospital of Cook County in Chicago has been holding monthly "Reflective Reading" sessions as part of its regular schedule of team meetings. An interdisciplinary specialty that serves patients with serious or life-threatening illness, palliative care aims to relieve suffering and improve patients' quality of life throughout the continuum of care.

Dr. Jennifer Smith and Dr. Catherine Deamant introduced the group to civic reflection after attending Project on Civic Reflection facilitation trainings. Team members take turns selecting the readings and facilitating the discussions. Facilitators have chosen readings by a diverse set of authors, including Anna Akhmatova, Gwendolyn Brooks, Constantine Cavafy and John Updike.
The palliative care program had received grant funding support from the Prince Charitable Trusts to identify strategies for improving hospital personnel morale and selected the process of "reflective reading" as one of the strategies.

At the request of Stroger staff, the Project on Civic Reflection conducted an evaluation of the program's impact in the summer of 2009. Participants in the Stroger program were interviewed, using a standard survey designed to measure job satisfaction. The findings suggested that the Reflective Reading series has enhanced the job satisfaction of members of the Palliative Care Service and increased their ability to work both with one another and with the patients they serve.

Several participants spoke in the interviews of feeling reaffirmed and rejuvenated in their work. As one participant put it, "Service is in the nature of being a physician—it is core to the work. This process reminds me why I went into medicine in the first place. It draws on the art and humanistic aspect that often gets lost."

Reflective reading was also identified as an activity that addresses professionalism, a core competency in medical education, for physicians in training. As part of this project, a toolkit was developed to help other palliative care, hospice or multidisciplinary teams to implement this activity in other health care settings.