I would have to contact my lawyer
And Caroline Petrie is the same kind of thing. She refuses to stop thrusting her religion on patients. The trust says she can pray over them if they ask her to – but that’s not good enough, she has to force it on them unasked, blind to the discomfort that this would cause people who don’t happen to be like her.
“It is me, it is a natural thing for me to do,” she said. “If I am nursing, I would offer prayer to somebody and I am not going to change.”…Yesterday the mother-of-two said she would behave in exactly the same way: “I cannot divide my faith from my nursing care, I have to be the person I want to be.”
Note the Telegraph’s none-too-subtle nudge – she’s a mother of two, therefore she’s a nice warm normal person, who shouldn’t be expected to divide her ‘faith’ from her nursing. Note also the self-centered appeal to Being Me and having to Be The Person I Want To Be – note that it’s about her, not about other people.
The trust said:
“It is acceptable to offer spiritual support as part of care when the patient asks for it. But for nurses, whose principal role is giving nursing care, the initiative lies with the patient and not with the nurse. Nurses like Caroline do not have to set aside their faith, but personal beliefs and practices should be secondary to the needs and beliefs of the patient and the requirements of professional practice.”
But no, that’s not good enough. It’s up to Nurse Petrie to decide what patients have to put up with from her, it’s not up to her employers. Nurse P has god on her side.
“If they said ‘please don’t ask patients to pray’ then I am sorry, I can’t promise that, so where do we go from there? I would have to contact my lawyer.”
Because theism is mandatory and freedom from theism is not allowed, and if you don’t agree, we’ll sue. Got that?
I hope she does offer to pray for someone again, and then gets promptly sacked.
If a nurse suggested it to me, I’d be sorely tempted to reply “Yes, and maybe if that doesn’t work I could try sacrificing a chicken. I assume that you wouldn’t have a problem with me doing that in the ward. I’ll be very discreet..”
If I was suffering from an infectious disease, like scarlet fever or orchitis (I speak with some experience here) I would point out to Nurse Petrie that as God made the pathogens, and stood by watching as they invaded my body, he was hardly likely to help; and if he did then he would be running some sort of protection racket.
Ditto if I was in as a result of a road accident. God saw it coming (if you like, from when Adam was in short pants) and did nothing to head it off.
Then again, one might welcome Nurse Petrie’s offer to pray, provided she asked God to stay right out of it.
An old time-honoured rule for all involved in medicine: first do no harm. Epidemics, plagues, tidal waves: God’s record in that domain is patchy, to say the least. But perhaps he sends all that so he’ll be prayed to for help getting rid of it, which he then may or may not do; like the firebug who doubles as a volunteer firefighter.
Actually, a bit of a pathology case in his own right when you come to think about it.
We don’t need God’s help, nurse. He needs ours.
OTOH, Ian, there’s:
“Not our fault the basement flooded. It’s God’s. He knew what was gonna happen when we put all those marbles in the washin’ machine an he didn’t do squat.”
Elliott: Nice try, but a bit too close to the ‘we bring life’s disasters on ourselves by straying off the One True Path’ school of thought for my liking. There’s any number of preachers round who will give you a sermon long and loud on that theme.
I like the way she’ll pray to try to cure disease but needs to contact a lawyer for an employment issue :-)
Also, why not just pray for them in private. No need to tell the patient. Unless your goal is to look holy in front of people…
Ian’s critique of my rather feeble joke is well-taken. But it does seem to me that the “we bring life’s disasters on ourselves…” is odious on two counts: it blames the victim, and it multiplies entities considerably beyond necessity.