Blogs

The Northern Ireland Department of Health, Social Services and Public Safety has published a Code of Practice on Protecting the Confidentiality of Service User information which contains no explicit reference to healthcare chaplains. To download the document see their website.

The foreword to the guidenace states: "This guidance document is part of a suite of equality guides produced by the Department of Health (DH) for the NHS. It gives practical advice to NHS organisations to help them comply with recent equality legislation, understand the role of religion or belief in the context of healthcare, and integrate this knowledge into single equality schemes (SESs)." It contains some limited material about healthcare chaplains.

The Point of Care is a programme run by The King’s Fund that aims to transform patients’ experience of care in hospital. The goal of the programme is to enable health care staff in hospitals to deliver the quality of care they would want for themselves and their own families.

An article in the New York Times says that Chaplain services in New York City hospices have nearly doubled since 2004: About 65 percent of the city’s 4,000 hospice patients accept visits from chaplains today, compared with about 35 percent four years ago

The NAO have published their report on the provision of end of life care services, but it has nothing to say about chaplaincy.