A spokesperson of the Department of Health, while making a comment on the recent controversy involving doctors’ right to talk religion to their patients, said that it was the responsibility of the NHS Chaplaincy Service to meet any such requirements of the patients.
However, doctors seem to have had enough of this restriction and they claim that they want their right of free speech back. They are all set to bring this issue up for discussion in the next British Medical Association (BMA) representative meeting.
Feeding off a couple of recent incidents, the controversy has refused to die. At the beginning of this year, Anand Rao, a bank nurse, lost his job when he was talking to participants of a role-play situation, where they were playing patients, about the need to trust God and turning to him in times of suffering. Another similar incident happened with Caroline Petrie, a nurse from North Somerset, who found that she was suspended by her employers as she had tried to offer prayers for a patient.
Dr Bernadette Birtwhistle, who is a cancer specialist and also works with the Christian Medical Fellowship was not impressed with the prevailing scenario and felt that the excessive curb on doctors’ interaction with patients was not helping the patients much. He also said that there was a common belief among people that Christianity is not very helpful in such situations.
According to Jonathan Chamberlain, a partner at Wragge & Co, one way to stop these kinds of controversies from assuming a bigger proportion is to communicate clear employment policies for the employees on this issue. The CIPD Certificate in Employment Relations, Law and Practice provides a firm foundation in all the areas of HR and employment law; click on CIPD training for a course which will help you understand how employment practice works within a personnel department, and to gain a broad grasp of employment law so you can set your own organisation
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