Virtual Methodist

12,000 patients left for 12 hours on trolleys - Daily Mail Two-tier plan to solve crisis in A&E service - The Guardian NHS Nurse Shut Baby in Cupboard - The Sun Doctors Deserting A&E - The Times Foreign NHS Cheats Push Aside Cancer Patients - Sunday Express Hospital Hit by Fresh Fears over Falsified Cancer Records - The Observer Hospital Food Investigation as Patients Fed on £4 a Day - The Herald Babies and Mothers at Risk from Midwife Shortage - the i Warning to Doctors as Threat of Superbug Resurfaces - The Herald Crisis in Maternity Care 'Putting Lives at Risk' - The Independent Boy Victim of Hospital in Police Probe - Daily Mail Hospital 'Fakes' Cancer Records - the i Hospitals Full to Bursting - The Times Hospital Faces Claim of Cancer Care Cover-Up - The Guardian That is just one week of front page headlines from the national daily newspapers... And this is by no means the worst for NHS-kicking.  I've said it before and I will sa...

I've effectively been offline for a couple of days thanks to ongoing technical difficulties together with a lack of time in which to address them properly... I'll be back on the phone tomorrow... Anyway, that has meant I've missed a couple of days of "thanksgiving" as per my most recent self-imposed blogging discipline... Had that not be the case yesterday I would definitely have been thanking those who helped out at our Coffee Morning at the manse and those who donated to the Save a Heart Campaign which we were raising money for, a scheme whereby a team from the Royal Victoria Hospital Cardiothoracic Department are helping to revitalise cardiac care in Nigeria. In the light of that, on Friday I had planned to put on record, yet again, my thankfulness for our own wonderful, if much-derided, National Health Service and the privilege it is to work as a chaplain within it. But I may well come back to that later in the month... But for today I offer an awkward ...

This is the responsive Psalm we will be using at our 11am service in Belfast South Methodist this morning, where my Methodist colleague and lead chaplain in the Belfast Hospitals Trust will be speaking on the subject of "Where is God when it hurts?" How long, O Lord ? How long? Have you forgotten me for ever? How long will you turn your face in another direction? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and fears through the night and each day walk around with sorrow lying like a lump of lead in my heart? How long will my enemies look down their noses at me? Look at me and give me an answer, O Lord my God. Restore light to my eyes, or I will gladly sink into the long sleep of death; Then my enemy will say, "I have got the better of him at last," and my opponents will dance with joy at my defeat. But I entrust myself to your unfailing love; My heart dances with joy at the thought of your salvation. I will sing to the Lord ,...

I've been using this book for a few months now as a devotional prior to going onto the wards of the Ulster Hospital as chaplain, ever since a number of them appeared there as a resource to share with those  wrestling with cancer. Its authors have experienced cancer themselves directly and within their families, and have a long pedigree of working within the sphere of prayer for healing, and this book finds its origin in a frustration that there was little written from an explicitly Christian perspective as they faced cancer. The title, tone and even the physical form of the book marks it out as being aimed primarily at women, but there is plenty in here that is useful for anyone going through the whole testing-diagnosis-treatment continuum of care, and those accompanying them on that journey, be it as chaplain, pastor, family member or friend. That is especially true of some of the prayers at the end of the book. The folksy "thought for the day" style will not appeal to...

Just incase anyone interested in the issue of chaplaincy missed the comment which Dr. Presswood appended to the post prompted by his appearance on the Today programme , you will find his comments on chaplaincy here. He protests loudly about not being anti-religious per-se but his tone is (as in the aforementioned Radio 4 appearance), patronising, using terms like "credulity", accusing chaplains roles as "morphing" while he portrays the attitudes of others in healthcare as "improving". His reference to scripture is not only extremely selective but misleading, both in terms of actual referencing (it is 2 John chapter 1 verse 7 rather than John chapter 2 verse 7, which would have been a reference to Jesus turning water into wine... which chaplains only rarely do...) but also emphasis, as the context of " John 1: 2  for example is not about heathens or non-believers but about "super-spiritual" individuals who regard physical existence as unimp...

Just a quickie today to point you in the direction of a short documentary I ended up watching last night instead of my usual game of 5-a-side football... My eye was drawn to it, partly off the back of my post last week on chaplaincy , because it was a look at various forms of chaplaincy in the city of Liverpool, under the appalling title of "Angels of Mersey" (whichever production assistant dreamt that one up should be soundly beaten and given a job with Hallmark...) Anyway, it's on BBC2 on a Monday at 8pm (and will be on BBC iPlayer for about a week per episode) and doesn't just cover hospital chaplaincy, but last night also covered University chaplaincy and will be looking at sports chaplaincy with the chaplain to Liverpool's third best team, Everton (third after Liverpool and Liverpool Reserves according to Bill Shankly), street pastors, and chaplaincy with Jewish and Muslim student chaplains. Given some of the coverage recently about the anti-Christian bi...

"B£##$y ministers! What's the f*?%!^g point of them around here!?" This was the profound question posed by one of the porters outside the chaplaincy office yesterday not realising that I could hear every word from inside, and could recognise his voice. If I hadn't been on the phone at the time I might have invited him in for a chat about his reservations on the role of chaplains in hospitals... I assume that is what he was referring to... Either that or the efficacy of our Health Minister Edwin Poots and his colleagues, and I'm not going to make any public comment on them here! It's not just porters who are asking that question however... The Humanist and Secular societies and their fellow travellers have understandably been asking it in various forms for some time. There was also a recent Freedom of Information Request concerning the amount of money spent on chaplains throughout the NHS in Northern Ireland by by MLA Conall McDevitt, which prompted a lot...

One of the rationale's behind this season of Lent is that we remember Jesus' 40 days in the wilderness. Matthew and Luke offer us blow by blow accounts of Jesus' temptations there, while the third of these so called synoptic gospels, Mark, makes much less of it saying that after his baptism: At once the Spirit sent him out into the desert, and he was in the desert for forty days, being tempted by Satan. He was with the wild animals, and angels attended him. Mark 1:12-13 (ANIV) We tend to concentrate on the activities of Satan in this episode in Jesus' story, but in keeping with the "whatever is good... think about such things" principle that I'm trying to dwell on over Lent, I would love to know more about the attending angels... But then again I saw them in action this morning, as I was doing my usual round of the Ulster Hospital as chaplain. Many people there, and in other health care establishments, feel like they are lost and alone in a h...

OK... Warning. I'm about to rant again... This time it is due to a piece of junk mail that landed on my doorstep yesterday... The sheer amount of unsolicited mail that goes straight from letterbox to blue bin is usually enough to trigger a rant... But on this occasion it was because of a kind offer by Sarah Muggeridge to provide me with some assistance to deal with the implications of the government's " End of Life Care Strategy " published last summer. Now I don't know whether this offer is coming to me in my role as chaplain to the local hospital, where I am actually on the multi-disciplinary palliative care education sub-group (the title is longer than the meetings), but the fact that it was sent to the church's PO Box address, suggests that the name and address was gleaned by some web-crawling bot, that has cribbed my name and address from either the local or national church website. With that in mind... one general point... Any junk mail senders take note...