In the Literature

Anne Aldridge, Derek J. Fraser, Keith Morrison. “What do people talk to chaplains about?,” Scottish Journal of Healthcare Chaplaincy 12, no. 2 (2009): 3-10. • Chaplains in UK hospitals continue to heed the urgings of Mowatt, Swinton, as well as administrators of the National Health Service to conduct evidence-based research, which will demonstrate the efficacy of the roles they play in health care. This paper reports one such effort that collects basic, but nevertheless important, information about a hospital chaplain’s work: what do people talk to chaplains about? With verbatim writing a standard practice in one hospital, the authors took the forty-three verbatims written by chaplains during a three-month period of 2007 and, with permission, gave them to two independent chaplains to review. The verbatims had not been written for the project. The chaplains, independent of each other, read and identified the main themes from each verbatim, compared their findings and then did an additional check of the themes using the computer program NVivo. The fifty-seven categories identified fell into four major groups: spiritual themes/exploration, hospital experiences, life stories and emotional language. They give examples and discuss each of the groups in turn. The authors assert that the value of their research is, first of all, to show that the “contents” of a chaplain’s visit may be the subject of research and that the focus of the visit may be on the person of the patient. They also acknowledge that this project does not answer the question of whether the pastoral visits were beneficial to the patients.