Chaplain, The NHS and a Moron

I’m not the world’s biggest fan of the NHS; generally speaking, I see it as a monstrous waste of billions of pounds that is in dire need of urgent and radical reform, if not outright abolition. I keep my eyes open for any radical ideas for reform. However, Melanie Reid in The Times has come up with perhaps the most startling suggestion for reform – more hospital chaplains.

And she bases this on something she saw on the TV:

The first part of Channel 4's fly-on-the-wall series, which runs for another two weeks, looked into the modern world of emergency medicine. This wasn't ER or Scrubs, this was ugly reality - wave upon wave of young people, drunk, regardless, violent and rude, brought in with various terrible injuries as a result of intoxication.

First things first; if your idea of medical reality comes from ER or Scrubs, then you really do need to do some work in joining the reality based community. They are fiction. They are not real. Likewise, The Bill doesn’t represent real policing in this country in this day and age. And prison isn't actually like Porridge.

What this does point to, though, is not so much a problem with the NHS (although fuck knows there are a whole load of problems with that institution) but rather with society as a whole. If our youth is pissed up and looking for a ruck, then is that really a problem for the hospitals? Or should society as a whole actually be looking at those problems, leaving hospitals to look after the sick and ill? After all, hospitals sometimes struggle with their basic core mission of looking after other people’s health – tasking them with improving the moral rectitude of the whole nation seems a little ambitious.

Not, however, for Melanie Reid:

We would be sensible to regard it as a modern morality play, especially in a week when the National Secular Society called for the NHS to stop funding hospital chaplains. The society estimates that £40 million a year is spent on giving religious groups a presence in hospitals. In many areas secularism has much to recommend it. In this instance they are wrong and mean-spirited. There has never been a greater need for a spiritual presence in hospitals.

We’d be sensible to call it a documentary rather than a modern morality play. On the grounds that, you know, it is a documentary.

And why is there a need for greater spiritual presence in hospitals? Unless Jesus himself comes down from a cloud and opens a can of serious whup-ass on some of the scum clogging up A&E, I rather think the scope of the Church is limited in dealing with these problems.

Not so for the author of this curiously crap article. See, the patients really are part of the problem:

The patients showed a total lack of responsibility for their actions. They swore at staff, they smirked, they were abusive, complaining, obstructive, hysterical and completely unapologetic. As for gratitude, why, it's a free service, isn't it? What's to be grateful for? There was an almost total lack of the embarrassment or thanks that former generations would have displayed.

Just to clarify for everyone, the NHS is not free. But you can’t blame this young proles for treating it as if it is free when every bit of rhetoric about or defending the NHS refers to it as a free service, now, can you? This whole fucking country labours under the delusion that the National Health Service is free. No it fucking ain’t. It is free at the point of service. And if you want people to start respecting it a bit more, then you might want to remind people that it is something they have paid for, out of their hard-earned taxes.

But it isn’t just the wayward youth who contribute to the demand for chaplains to save the NHS: it is the doctors as well:

The doctor, a young man with empty eyes and a hard-drinking face, did not engage with us. He spoke as if we were five miles away. For all he was utterly professional and faultless, I felt as if something had died inside him. He was almost like an addict: I wondered if he was so hooked on the adrenalin of coping with stab wounds and fights that nothing less than that stirred him.

That paragraph is borderline libellous; if I was the doctor and I saw that, I’d be very keen to slap a law suit on someone who disses me on a national newspaper’s website.

And the irony of talking about ungrateful people in the same time as implying a doctor who was “utterly professional and faultless” might also be a hard-drinking adrenaline junkie may have escaped the author, but it hasn’t escaped me.

You see the same look in abbatoir workers' eyes. They shut down all feeling, all judgment. The patients, deserving or not, have become lumps of meat to them. Monica Garnsey, the maker of the documentaries, believes that what patients want most is the sense that their doctor is sympathetic. But their patience has been stretched too far

Again, there’s a gap between talking about gratitude for the professional medical workers in the NHS and then comparing them to abattoir workers.

Yet I’d actually rather have a doctor who sees me as a lump of meat in need of a clean, clinical cure/treatment rather than having a doctor who is a clueless fuck but wants to be my best bud. I’m not looking for sympathy from the doctor or the nurse; I am looking for them to make me feel better.

So maybe a little moral panic would be a good thing; maybe we need more chaplains, if only to check the growth in this new amoral, compassion-neutral transaction, where the drunk and feckless not only waste billions of pounds but leave hospital as ignorant and unreformed as they went in. Maybe we need to be a bit more judgmental, for all our sakes.

I’m going to throw this out to my readers – can anyone really think of an occasion where moral panic has been a good thing? Because I really, really can’t think of a single example to back up that ludicrous statement.

And of course the drunk and the feckless are going to leave hospital as ignorant and unreformed as when they went in – it is a hospital for fuck’s sake, not a shitting school. And as for being more judgmental, that’s all very well – until you consider that judgement and morality is relative. Which allows me to be more judgmental and call Melanie Reid a god-bothering, shrill ignoramous.

In a world sometimes scarily lacking in values, chaplains have a vital symbolic role as well as a practical one. Chaplains, in my experience, do not proselytise; they simply afford patients the kind of time, care and compassion that medical staff can no longer give them. No, they cannot cure binge drinking, but they do stand for something resolutely good and wise.

Chaplains, in my experience, do proselytise, and therefore should be removed from hospitals forthwith.

Of course, my argument is anecdotal and unsubstantiated. But then so is Melanie Reid’s. Her deeply flawed argument easily exposed, let’s move on from that paragraph.

The secularists have missed the point completely. They contacted 233 acute and mental health trusts, which spent £26.72 million on chaplains. This money, they say, could be used to employ 1,300 nurses or 2,645 cleaners, which is as facile as saying that we could save £3 billion plus in A&E budgets by banning booze.

Seriously, this woman actually debates whether it is better to have fucking God spods in wards or nurses who can actually help people get better? What the fuck? Maybe we should go the whole hog, and stop investing in any new medicine and equipment. Instead, let’s have a cathedral in each and every fucking hospital. Then, maybe, we can heal people through the power of prayer.

Terry Sanderson, the president of the society, even claimed that people in hospital should seek visits from their own vicar, priest, rabbi or imam if they needed religious support. What an arrogant man he sounds.

No, he sounds sensible and pragmatic.

It is non-religious people, lost in a crisis, who need chaplains the most. Look at Jade Goody, married and blessed as she was dying.

Right, so we should continue to employ chaplains in hospital because Jade Goody got Jesus before she shuffled off this mortal coil? The policy of the whole of the NHS on God should be governed by Jade Goody converting to Christianity in her final weeks and months? Goody’s death has been used as justification for some good things, and also a whole lotta crap. This is perhaps the biggest load of crap yet.

Look at the tragic, chaotic lives of some of the young people lying in A&E with no family to phone. It is the injured, the dying and the bereaved, who seek, not necessarily God, but a little kindness and succour at their time of greatest need.

Don’t we employ people – like, say, social workers – who can offer a bit of kindness (and at the same time, something more useful like practical help) for these people in their hour of need? And is Reid really so detached from reality that she believes that your average, drunken and violent young chav is going to show even an iota of fucking respect to a priest?

Besides, aren’t they already chaplains in hospitals? If they really are the answer to the problem of nauseating oiks attending A & E, how fucking come the problem still exists? But then, I suppose, keeping chaplains in hospital is a very NHS thing to do. Keep on throwing money at something that doesn’t work.