Here is a simple fact: levels of religious belief are in decline in the UK. Here’s another one: the NHS is spending more money than ever on chaplaincy services. At a time when the NHS is under greater pressure than ever before, it is incredible, is it not, that it is spending £23.5m a year to provide a mix of Christian, Muslim and Jewish chaplains whose job description is, apparently, to “promote, facilitate and administer spiritual, religious and psycho-social care”, an increase of £1.5m on the previous year. Psycho-social care? Really?
Quite what the NHS is doing spending our money on chaplaincy services is beyond me. It is true that many hospital patients will have their own different religious faith but I am not sure why the NHS should be providing its own vicars, imams, priests and rabbis for them. If I was of faith, in my hospital bed, it is quite possible that I might want a chat with my local vicar, especially if the prognosis was none too clever, but I would not expect the hospital to provide me with one. I’d give him – vicars are usually hims – a call, or I’d ask the nurse to give him a call and get him to come and see me. I’m sure he’d fit me in between Sunday services, weddings and funerals.
An argument for chaplains in hospitals is that they can help patients who are confronted with mortality. That’s obviously not a nice position to be in and all of us will be there one day, but I would rather confront my own mortality by what is true and what is real. A chaplain might well give me some nice words about how I might survive my own death and spend eternity in heaven but I wouldn’t believe him. In other words, he might give me comfort but what he would be telling me would probably not be true.
Break down the £23.5 million cost of chaplains still further and the “psycho-social care” doesn’t come cheap. Several NHS trusts say their pay rates for a full-time chaplain range from £30,764 to £40,558 and even a part-time chaplain rakes in between £25,783 and £34,530. Nice work if you can get it. Compare these salaries with the starting salary of a full-time nurse of £21,478. Who would I rather have patrolling the hospital wards?
Some NHS trusts even pay religious institutions, including the incredibly wealthy Catholic church, to conduct extra religious services. What on earth has all this got to do with the NHS?
This is not pastoral care: it is religious care. Chaplaincy could be provided by local vicars, priests, imams and rabbis on the same basis as an out of hours GP service. No one should be denying the devout their access to chaplains but we should surely not be paying for it out of our taxes. It’s certainly nothing to do with the NHS and shouldn’t be funded from it. The taxpayer should not be the Charlies paying for the chaplains.
