By Steve Weatherbe

THE GOOD NEWS is that the Vancouver Island Health Authority (VIHA) isn’t cutting its chaplaincy service – as its counterpart on the Lower Mainland, the Fraser Valley Health Authority, has done.

The bad news is that Vancouver Island pastors have found their access to patients in VIHA’s hospitals seriously curtailed, regardless of whether VIHA is maintaining its staff of in-house chaplains.

The pastors are complaining that VIHA, in an excess of zeal for patients’ privacy, is making it hard for them to find out who among their individual denominations is in hospital.

VIHA, on the contrary, said it is making available denominational lists, as part of a trial project that could soon become permanent.

Father William Hann, the pastor of St. Joseph the Worker parish in Victoria, said the access issue is serious enough that Catholic Bishop Richard Gagnon, Anglican Bishop James Cowan, Lutheran minister Lyle Mackenzie and a Muslim layman  are jointly requesting a meeting with VIHA director Howard Waldnar on the issue.

While VIHA employs chaplains under the direction of its spiritual affairs branch, the complaints are coming from pastors assigned by their denominations to hospital visits – or those who visit as part of their ordinary pastoral duties.

Their access, Hann said, has eroded sharply over the past three years. “If you value the holistic approach to health, you should not be denying clergy access under the guise of privacy.”

The message from VIHA is confusing. A VIHA spokesperson told a reporter for the Victoria Catholic Diocesan Messenger that patients were no longer being asked if they wanted spiritual support from a visiting minister, out of respect for their privacy.

“In this day and age, that would not be correct. It would be an invasion of somebody’s privacy,” Suzanne Germain, director of communications for VIHA, told the Messenger.

“For privacy reasons, that wouldn’t be something that we would share with a priest,” said Germain. “That’s not relevant to your care, necessarily.”

But Sujata Connors, VIHA’s manager for spiritual health services, said a pilot project begun in several VIHA hospitals in November does provide incoming patients a form enabling them to “request spiritual health services.”

Before this, she said, there was no standard form in use across the system. Connors said that VIHA recognizes the importance of spirituality in health care, and has salaried chaplains at hospitals in Victoria, Duncan and Nanaimo.

Many years ago, each hospital maintained a list of all patients and their denominational affiliation, said the Rev. Arthur Menu – who also works for VIHA’s spiritual health services, supervising and training VIHA’s chaplains.

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“They were available to anyone,” he said, and they ran counter to privacy concerns and legislation.

People were asked to fill in admission forms that asked them what their religious affiliation was, not whether they wanted to see a clergy person.

The pilot program provides “denomination-specific” lists of people who have requested spiritual help. “Pastors from that specific denomination get to see that list,” said Menu.

Connors said that “it is terribly disappointing” that some pastors appear not to be getting the word about the lists. She believes the pilot project will be made a permanent fixture at VIHA.

The Rev. Colin Liske of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Nanaimo has had the same experience as Hann.

“There used to be a list of all patients with their denominations – or [noting] whether they had no denomination. Then we could only see a list of our denomination. Then there stopped being a list at all. We were promised it by the hospital chaplain; but I checked weekly for it for four months, and it was never there. I just gave up.”

But in the last week Liske has checked again: now there is, indeed, a Lutheran list. But there are no names on it.

Liske sees the shutting out of spiritual visitors as part of a pervasive social shift in favour of the separation of church and state.

“I’m for the separation in the traditional sense of the term, but it shouldn’t mean a wall between the church and state. The fire department still responds when a church burns down. Christian churches teach members to be obedient to civil powers. We train good citizens. The church and state should be partners.”

Then there is the whole matter of the positive impact of spiritual care on physical recovery, said Liske. “People who are flat on their back and helpless are very grateful to see you. It has a real impact that I’ve seen personally.”

On top of that, there are people who are dying, for whom the medical system can do little.

“We provide hope, and I imagine the Muslim and Buddhist spiritual visitors do, too. We read scripture together, we pray; it’s an amazingly important thing to people.”

While some might fear predatory clerics evangelizing the weak and vulnerable, Liske emphasized: “I’ve been doing this for 18 years, and never seen any abuse. And only once has a person not wanted me to visit. Until this new policy, I was seeing five people a week.”

May 2010