Apparently some Christian doctors are fed up with the nonsense about health workers not being allowed to pray or offer spiritual care of patients. Or are we supposed to call them ‘clients’ now? Stories have emerged in the last few years of nurses getting into trouble for offering to pray with sick patients.
Well, according to the BBC website:
Doctors are demanding that NHS staff be given a right to discuss spiritual issues with patients as well as being allowed to offer to pray for them. Medics will tell the British Medical Association conference this week that staff should not be disciplined as long as they handle the issue sensitively. The doctors said recent cases where health workers had got into trouble were making people fearful.
The problem is, according to the doctors:
The General Medical Council code suggests that discussing religion can be part of care provided to patients – as long as the individual’s wishes are respected. But at the start of this year the Department of Health issued guidance warning about proselytising. It said that discussing religion could be interpreted as an attempt to convert which could be construed as a form of harassment.
The debate goes a bit further before (inevitably) the tiny National Secular Society gets invited to put its oar in:
We have to be very careful about how we tread on this issue. If we say it is ok for doctors and nurses to provide spiritual care and pray for patients it can all too quickly get out of hand and we will have staff preaching on the wards. The risk is that it makes patients feel uncomfortable. They may feel compelled to say ‘yes’ thinking their care will suffer. Really, it is an infringement of their privacy. I think we should be very clear that patients should have to ask for this, not offered it.
But Joyce Robins, co-director of Patient Concern said:
Most complaints from patients are about being on a conveyor belt of care. They don’t rate with staff as real people. Offering to say a prayer is a warm and kind thought. Most patients will accept it as such. It is no more offensive than being offered a sleeping pill. You can say thanks but that sort of thing isn’t my cup of tea. But if Christian doctors see this as an opportunity to promote their faith to people at a time when they are particularly vulnerable, that is totally unacceptable.
Two things spring to mind here. First, proselytism in such circumstances has never ever been advocated by any Christian with a shred of sensitivity or good theology. But for doctors or nurses to hold back from taking seriously the spiritual needs of patients is a nonsense of the first order. That is like treating a patient as ‘the cancer in bed one’ or the ‘broken leg in Ward C’ instead of a fully human being whose spirituality influences their mental and physical wellbeing.
Secondly, the NSS just doesn’t get the blindingly obvious fact that negation of a religious worldview does not leave some neutral territory occupied by atheists or secularists. This nonsense really needs to be knocked on the head. Take away a religious/Christian perspective and you are left with a particular perspective on life, death, illness, being human and so on that is positively shaped by particular assumptions – that are no more valid or invalid than Christian /theistic assumptions.
Of course doctors and nurses should be free to pray for patients where such is requested or where the appropriateness is evidenced by the case history and what is known about the patient. Of course no one should be forced to accept prayer inappropriately. Of course the patient should be protected from mad people – be they religious or atheist. And of course Terry Anderson and the NSS should realise how out of touch they are – speaking only with the authority of a few thousand people on their register.
I would love to see a National Secular Society response to the article by Paul Vallely in June 2009’s Third Way (which doesn’t seem to be available online just now) entitled Being Reasonable. In it he questions why bodies like the NSS ‘spend almost all their energy on rubbishing religion rather than telling us what distinctive insights humanism has to offer contemporary society.’ He decries the ‘false polarity between an intolerant rationalism and an oppressive religiosity.’ He concludes with an appeal for ‘an articulation from the British Humanist Association and the National Secular Society of the distinct contribution that humanism can make to modern moral dilemmas.’ He goes on:
The challenge to them is to set out that vision in entirely positive terms which can be comprehended in common by those of all faiths and none. They must do it without constantly resorting to negatives, statements of what they are against or contrasts of the things their vision is free from.
Any offers?
Nick Baines's Blog 
June 28, 2009 at 8:53 pm
Preach it Nick! Spot on. Personally, I find the NSS and the BHA provide some good comedy with their amusing press releases supporting this or that event, over which they have no influence.
The BHA claim to ‘support’ humanists in Britain. I suggest a few humanists out there give them a ring and ask what support they can offer. Not very much is the answer.
June 28, 2009 at 9:34 pm
I work as a GP. and it’s got so ridiculous that a patient recently apologised to me for mentioning that she was a Christian in case I was offended. Weird world.
June 29, 2009 at 7:35 am
I suppose the problem for Atheists who have turned their convictions into a fundamentalist crusade for what they call science and progress is that the only way they can conceive the motives of a Christian doctor is a reflection of their own. They can’t imagine someone who didn’t crusade for religiosity like the Daily Express Knight in armour, because to admit the fact that 99% of UK Christians are nothing of the sort would call into question the whole fantasy on which their religion is built in the first place.
June 29, 2009 at 10:18 am
More years ago then I care to remember, I was a patient in St.Thomas’s hospital in London. There were short morning prayers after breakfast conducted, I think, by Sister for all the patients and staff. I found it a very helpful way to start the day and don’t remember hearing any protests from fellow patients. It was just part of ward life. I wonder what the reaction would be today !
,
June 29, 2009 at 10:40 am
I’m glad you can take up the argument on behalf of the church. We’ve got to have a wake-up call before it’s too late and the Trojan horse of secularism disgorges its troops into an unsuspecting society.
June 29, 2009 at 2:02 pm
I wonder if the NSS uses the same argument about patients feeling ‘compelled to say yes’ in opposing euthanasia?
June 29, 2009 at 3:55 pm
I think that Christian Doctors are right to have things clarified in this way. I find that Guidelines are just that, Guidelines, they are not the law – but a suggested way of best practice. But not necessarily the only way, and not necessarily the only best practice.
If I were ill in hospital, I would welcome any conversations with medical personnel who have a Christian faith and are willing to share it.
In the same way, I would not take offence at a Muslim, Hindu, Sikh or Buddist medic talking to me about their faith and belief and how it helps them in their life and to do their job.
I just feel that the demonisation of Christianity (and other faiths) by the NSS and to a lesser degree by humanists is wrong and wonder why we stand by and let them get away with it.
Which is why your post is so welcome to me.
June 29, 2009 at 6:00 pm
A later Pastor of Abraham Lincoln’s Church observed that secularists are essentially parasitic on the Judeo-Christian heritage. They have been nourished by it but give nothing back, but rather deplete the vigour.
It follows your line of thought in challenging them to articulate a positive vision.
For my own part I keep recalling Pope Benedict’s identification of the “culture of death” as it’s principal contribution.
We can point to a vast collection of ideas/ institutions which grew from our belief system.
We should cheerfully and confidently list them from Universities to the idea of time having a beginning and an end: from the abolition of slavery to an array of charities.
We end with the Monty Python question
What have the militant secularists ever done for us?
June 29, 2009 at 10:30 pm
>NSC
A couple of typos? NSS?
M.
June 30, 2009 at 12:47 am
Strange how the situation has been turned on its head- I was being harangued on a forum for the Atheist Bus Campaign a few weeks ago for not saying what I do believe, but saying what I don’t believe. My excuse then was that my purpose was not to lay out my beliefs or evangelise, but rather to get rid of misconceptions about Christianity. It doesn’t seem that the NSS can use that same excuse here, as no one’s making any false allegations about secularism. One gets a bit confused by the mixed messages given out by supposedly secular organisations. On the one hand, they maintain that atheism and secularism are simply ‘non-beliefs’ (and then go on a tirade about that wretched teapot). They then create what are supposed to be ‘alternatives to religious camps’ (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/5674934/Richard-Dawkins-launches-childrens-summer-camp-for-atheists.html), not seeming to notice that if this really were the case, there would be plenty of summer camps that fill exactly this role already.
I had a question on the praying issue at my Medicine interview at Cardiff. I hadn’t thought about it much, but I gave a brief, shaky answer about prospective medical students looking at the rules of medical practice before they applied to university, so they didn’t go into a job their faith wouldn’t allow them to do. Likewise, the GMC has a responsibility not to change the rules forcing or preventing actions by Doctors which are forbidden/encouraged respectively by their faith, or moral stance. Obviously there is a difference when we are concerned with new technology, and the reason there are no regulations on it is that it hadn’t been invented previously, but prayer has been around for centuries, playing a huge role in the lives of many. It seems the NSS are forgetting that there is a pastoral side to Medicine, alongside the purely objective and scientific. There are places for both within the job- I would not advocate a Doctor abandoning drug use and simply praying for his patients, for example. Yet it is difficult to see how simply offering prayer can be so detrimental- anything to suggest that it is is, at this stage, purely speculative. In any case, there are a great many instances where non-scientific judgements are made in Medicine, and it seems to me that the negation of these would lead to the destruction of medical practice. This might seem like an exaggeration, but there are so many ethical, axiological and personal aspects of medicine that it is impossible to imagine it without them (try Biomedical Sciences). The NSS complain that there could be a slippery slope and that we need to be ‘careful’ about where the line is drawn. Yet, I don’t know any theist who would dispute this. Of COURSE we need to be careful, and make sure the boundaries are clear, but this is no argument in itself against offering prayer to patients. The NSS are simply reiterating the thoughts of any thinking person (especially in medical practice), and trying to use it to their advantage. I would imagine that when actually asked for an argument against it, they would be hard pressed.
July 2, 2009 at 3:17 pm
What’s all the fuss?
Terry Sanderson said that this was an issue where care was needed – and many here seem to agree with that. He thinks that proselytisation is inappropriate in medical care, and many here seem to agree with that too.
In fact, most people here seem to agree with the NSS line. They just don’t like what they think the NSS represents, or think that it’s too small to deserve a hearing at all, or that it’s not “positive” enough.
The NSS said that the request for prayer or religious discussion should come from the patient. They didn’t say that doctors should be banned from ever mentioning religion or praying for or with their patients. They just don’t think it’s appropriate for professionals to be actively offering to do so if they don’t know how the offer will be received.
Maybe you could have a sign up: “atheists: ask Dr Smith about Camp Quest – Christians: ask Dr Green about prayer meetings”.
I think that would be a good compromise between the pro-religious and the anti-religious. And that is part of what secularism is all about: finding a way for all of us to live together.
By the way, David Keen said:
“I wonder if the NSS uses the same argument about patients feeling ‘compelled to say yes’ in opposing euthanasia?”
Yes.
The NSS has traditionally been in favour of voluntary euthanasia, which means the request comes from the individual concerned – which is exactly the same argument they have used in the case of prayer.
No problem there, then, either.
Dan