A Thinking Man

I have long thought that it seems ridiculous that hospital chaplains should be funded by the NHS - not least because all other NHS care is allowed because of its evidence base and scientific sense, and because the religious bodies should pay the wages of their own staff.   I recently wrote a piece expressing my frustration that £300,000 of public money (i.e. taken from your taxes and mine) should be spent on providing a religious space in a hospital (see A Waste of Space and Money?).

In the present economic climate where all expenditure must be examined extremely carefully, any decision to use medical money to pay for religious entities (who ought to pay for themselves) must surely be questioned even more loudly.  I am grateful to the National Secular Society for publishing the following correspondence:

NSS member Malcolm Dodd had the following exchange of correspondence with the United Lincolnshire Hospitals Trust.

To Rev Alison Amelia, chaplain, From Malcolm Dodd:
Please advise your salary (including extras such as pension etc) and expenses, i.e., the total cost of your employment to the Trust. Please also advise the total costs to the Trust of your part-time assistants.

From Rev Alison Amelia to Malcolm Dodd:
I am sorry I do not know who you are and therefore I am not prepared to disclose anything about my Salary, pension, and expenses which is Highly Confidential.

From Malcolm Dodd to Alison Amelia:
I ask the question as a user of the Trust and a local and national taxpayer, i.e., your effective paymaster. Now that you know who I am, can you please answer my questions?

I would like to assess how many more medical staff could be employed if you and your acolytes were funded by your real employer the C of E? It is an absolute disgrace that in this time of increasing fiscal hardship within the health service, this Trust admits to wasting £317,600 (apparently equivalent to 6.5 medical staff) each year on chaplaincy; a service that is provided free of cost by other sects and should be by the C of E. The total cost (including the provision and maintenance of chapels, churches, prayer rooms/centres etc) must be considerably higher than the admitted figure and I wonder at the improvements in medical care that this money could provide?

The function of a hospital is medical care and many ancillary non-medical services are traditionally provided by volunteers, the same should be true with religion. Do you not feel any pangs of religious conscience when you realize that you are effectively depriving patients of medical care?

From Sylvia Knight, chief nurse, to Malcolm Dodd:
I was shocked to be passed your email that you sent to one of our chaplains asking for disclosure of their salary and your comments regarding the value of chaplaincy in hospitals. I find your email offensive and I would understand if the original recipient of the email did too. It is well known that pastoral and spiritual care is an important part of the holistic care that we provide to our patients and our staff and I cannot understand why anyone would challenge the value of a service that costs the Trust less than 1% of its overall budget.

From Malcolm Dodd to Sylvia Knight:
I find it puzzling that you should be shocked and offended by my letter. I have no issue with the fact that some people find benefit from having access to a C of E Priest when in hospital; many of your patients do find comfort from the attention of dozens of other religious pastors that are not funded by the Trust. My objection is to their service being paid for out of your increasingly hard-pressed resources. If, in the future, your budget comes under increasing pressure (a very likely scenario), where will the first redundancies be made, from the medical staff or the chaplaincy; if you asked the hard-pressed taxpayers in the Trust area, I think that we both have a pretty good idea what the answer would be. I wonder how many in the Trust area actually realize that the chaplaincy services are paid by the Trust at an annual cost of £317,000, thereby inevitably reducing the provision of the medical care that is the Trust’s primary function?

The chaplaincy team are external service providers who should be entirely funded by their true employers, the church.

From Malcolm Dodd to Sylvia Knight:
I am still awaiting a response to my email. I will now make clear the reason that I was shocked to discover (two weeks ago) the huge amount of money being spent on clergy, a service that should be provided free-of-cost to the Trust by the wealthy C of E.

On 17 December 2004 at approximately 1700 my wife, Sally Dodd, was admitted by ambulance to the Grantham A & E in an unconscious state. It was admitted by your staff that she required a CT scan, no radiographer was available to carry this out. Sally’s indications were then misdiagnosed as meningitis, I was informed that her condition was serious and that she could die.

I was given the use of a private room just off A & E waiting; whilst there I was approached by a cleric who asked if I needed some help, I informed him that the only help required was for my wife from the medical staff. After a considerable time, my wife (who had a further fit episode) was then diagnosed as having a brain haemorrhage and was transferred to Queens Medical. Sally died on 22 December.

Little did I realize at the time that the cleric I met may very well have been the person who had used up the resources that should have been spent on providing the staff to carry out the urgent CT scan required by my wife. Now try to justify to me and your users the £317,000 plus that inevitably results in the reduction of medical provision.

Tags: Alison Amelia, chaplaincy, Chaplains, Church of England, cutbacks. NHS, hospitals, Malcolm Dodd, medical care, NSS, Sylvia Knight, taxpayers