Information about the launch

The Hon Barney Leith, Chair of the Multi-Faith Group for Healthcare Chaplaincy opened a gathering held at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London on 5 January to launcy two important new NHS Chaplaincy Documents.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I am Barney Leith, Chair of the Multi-Faith Group for Healthcare Chaplaincy.
Welcome to the launch of two important and long awaited documents.

• NHS Chaplaincy: Meeting the Spiritual and Religious needs of patients and staff
• Caring for the Spirit

We shall hear more about each of these documents shortly.
It is also near enough the first anniversary of the Multi Faith Group for Healthcare Chaplaincy as currently constituted - and marks the half-way point of my time as Chair of the Group.

The Multi Faith Group's predecessor body, the Multi Faith Joint National Working Party, began its work in 1998, following the Joint National Consultation in 1997, run by the Hospital Chaplaincy Council at the request of the Department of Health.

In the intervening years, the working party and the Multi Faith Group - with representation from the nine major faith communities of the UK - laboured long and hard on the text of the document that is being launched today as the Department's guidance on multi-faith chaplaincy.
It hasn't always been easy. But there can be no doubting the great commitment of all those involved to ensuring that patients and staff of all religions will have access to chaplains or spiritual care givers of their own faith.
Despite some considerable challenges, the group has kept going faithfully. I use the word 'faithfully' deliberately and with due thought. We are people of faith in more senses than one: we are people who clearly identify themselves with one of the great faiths and who live by the faith of which they are a part; and we are people who have faith in the importance of the work we have been doing and continue to do.

It is something of a commonplace now to say that Britain is a multi-faith and multi-cultural society. We have heard the Prime Minister on many occasions state his personal commitment to a multi-faith and multi-ethnic future for this country.

The Home Office is currently undertaking a major review of the government's relationship with the faith communities, in pursuance of a manifesto commitment.
This is heady stuff for those of us for whom being a person of faith has been something sub rosa, something about which we have been rather shamefaced during those long years in which the orthodoxy was that religion was a matter solely for the private sphere.

But now we can come out! We can openly admit that we have a faith, that our faith is central to our lives. And we find ourselves out in the sunshine. Religion is back in the public square. It is a force to be acknowledged and people of faith turn out to be - by and large - sane and having useful, if challenging things to say.

Of course, it is one thing to say this. It is quite something else to make it a reality. Right now, it is the thing to do, to consult representatives of the various religions.
But it wasn't so back in 1996, when moves began to see how 'other' faiths could be included in healthcare chaplaincy.

I don't know what the Department of Health's motives were in 1996 and 1997 - I am not sure I know what they are now - but the Department was in some ways ahead of the game. By launching the process that has led to today, they were setting in motion something that would be very much needed in the 21st century.

I am sure that, if those of us who first sat together round the table with Robert Clarke, the then Chief Executive of the Hospital Chaplaincy Council and co-ordinator of the Joint National Working Party, had known that it would take five years of work to get to this point, our hearts would have quailed. But God was kind and protected us from foreknowledge! And we set our feet to the road that brings us here today.

As I have said, we have had (and continue to have) our challenges. I hope it is not inappropriate on a day of celebration such as this to say that the Department of Health has not always been as helpful as it might have been. We have been through several Secretaries of State, and we have had to redraft more than once to meet the requirements of each of them.

However, I would like to thank Chief Nursing Officer Sarah Mullally for her support over the last year or so. Her energy and commitment have given us the boost we needed to get through the final stages of the preparation of the document. I would like, on behalf of the Multi Faith Group, to pay tribute to this commitment.
We still have our concerns - about the funding of chaplaincy and spiritual care, for example - and particularly about the lack of funding to build the capacity of the smaller faith communities with little or no experience of healthcare chaplaincy.

It is no longer enough to pay lip service to equality. If we are to take the notion of a multi-faith society seriously, we have to make it possible for those communities that do not have a history or tradition of engaging in the political and community processes of this country to do so.
In the case of healthcare chaplaincy, a number of the communities that have given time, energy and human resources to the work of the past five or six years need help to establish chaplaincy administrations. Without chaplaincy administrations they will be unable to fulfil the requirements that this guidance - which they have helped draft - imposes on them.

Level playing fields cost money.

Today is both an end and a beginning. It is the end of our five years of drafting. It is the beginning of an indefinite period of implementation and training and standard setting and monitoring. The Multi Faith Group stands ready to continue its work, in partnership with the faith communities, with other chaplaincy bodies and with the Department to promote the development of multi-faith chaplaincy to the highest professional levels.

I would like to pay tribute to all my colleagues, past and present, on the Working Party and the Multi-Faith Group. Perhaps the most important thing we have learned over the years is that what unites us is more important that what divides us. We are a living example of how people of different faiths can work together for the good of all, we are a living example of how true and lasting fellowship and friendship grows out of our collective acts of service to others.

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