The Bot Bin

Wednesday, July 8th, 2009

Controversy over Doctors’ Right to Discuss Religion with Patients

Anand Rao, a bank nurse, lost his job when he told some of his colleagues to turn to God while they were acting as patients in a role-play situation. This happened earlier in the year. In another similar incident, Caroline Petrie, a nurse from North Somerset was suspended from her job after she tried offering prayer for an old patient.

The BBC has now reported that doctors are going to raise the issue of talking religion with patients at their next annual meeting of representatives of British Medical association (BMA), which begins in the next few days.

Dr Bernadette Birtwhistle, who is associated with Christian Medical Fellowship and is also a cancer specialist, told the BBC that the doctors and other medical staff found it difficult not to talk about religion or prayers with the patients. He also expressed his dismay at the fact that their right of speech was not respected and there was a general belief that Christianity was not of great help to patients.

A spokesperson of the Department of Health commented that the responsibility of looking after the religious and spiritual needs of patients lied with the NHS Chaplaincy Service.

Jonathan Chamberlain, a partner at Wragge & Co, recently said that the solution to the problems of employees being fired because of espousing their religious beliefs could be managed if employers who did not want such incidents just warned their staff about it beforehand. 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.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 at 5:20 am and is filed under Entrepreneurs, Online Health, University of Religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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