The Free Churches Group (FCG) warmly welcomes the NHS England’s NHS Chaplaincy – guidelines for NHS managers on pastoral, spiritual and religious care, which recognises the invaluable contribution that Chaplains make to health and care and sets the ambition for inclusive chaplaincy services in all NHS settings.
The FCG is developing a chaplaincy hub to resource and equip those interested in chaplaincy. As part of this, we are actively engaged in supporting healthcare chaplains who come from a Free Church tradition to provide high-quality, evidence-based and patient centred chaplaincy care through a varied programme of development opportunities. As such, we are delighted to see the emphasis the guidelines place on training, support and supervision for chaplains including the recognition that chaplains should engage in a programme of Continuous Professional Development, ‘which may include attending external training.’ We hope that this will lead to greater budgetary support from within organisations to enable chaplains to take advantage of training and development opportunities.
The FCG is pleased to see the drive for high quality appointments in the guidelines, with a clear expectation for employers to seek the endorsement of a respective religion or belief community before the appointment of a chaplain. For candidates from Group Members of the FCG, this will enable employers to benefit from the quality assurance arrangements that we have in place. We recognise that chaplaincy is a distinct calling requiring particular skills and, as such, we agree with the statement in the guidelines that providing pastoral care for people in a faith community setting or in other areas of NHS care is not, on its own, necessarily sufficient to demonstrate suitability. Therefore, the FCG fully supports reference in the guidelines to use professional appointment advisors to assist with the recruitment process from the outset. We also commend the direction to make use of clinical simulations consisting of a chaplain-patient encounter observed by those experienced in chaplaincy as part of selection processes.
As an ecumenical body of twenty-seven Church/Parachurch groups the FCG represents approximately 10,000 congregations across England and Wales. The guidelines recognise the role chaplains can play connecting with faith groups to help organisations understand local needs and creating opportunities to improve services and address health inequalities. We strongly encourage the development of communication between NHS chaplaincy teams and Free Churches.
The FCG is disappointed that the new guidelines do not contain suggested staffing ratios as included in the guidance published in 2003 and 2015. These were widely used by chaplaincy teams to both submit business cases for additional staffing as well as defending possible cuts. We are, therefore, grateful that the members of the Chaplaincy Forum for Pastoral, Spiritual and Religious Care in Health have produced a staffing framework to complement the guidelines.
We recognise the considerable work involved in producing these new guidelines and would like to thank all those involved for their time and effort. The guidelines make clear that high quality holistic care within the NHS in England cannot be achieved without the full integration of chaplaincy. We look forward to continuing our work enabling healthcare chaplains and chaplaincy to flourish.