New Hospital Chaplain Trained As Counsellor

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30855, 14 September 1965, Page 18

New Hospital Chaplain Trained As Counsellor

Practical and academic aspects of pastoral care were given more emphasis in the United States, said the Rev. J. E. G. Irwin in an interview yesterday. Mr Irwin recently returned from New York to become assistant chaplain at the Christchurch Hospital. Formerly curate of St. Paul’s Anglican parish, Papa-

nui, Mr Irwin left Christchurch for America five years ago to gain experience in pastoral care and counselling. In America this type of work had stemmed from the unhappy experience of a minister who had spent a short time in a mental hospital and had realised the immense scope for such work. Mr Irwin said.

After he had had one year of clinical training in a hospital, Mr Irwin worked as a counsellor at the American Foundation of Religion and Psychiatry in New York. There 50 trained persons, including psychiatrists, clergymen, and social workers, managed a psychiatric clinic for fee-paying clients. Counselling was usually done by the clergymen under the wider supervision of the psychiatrists. Study of personal relationships and communications was important in hospital work, said Mr Irwin. It was impossible to help persons unless one had some appreciation of their problems, and a certain knowledge of psychiatry was helpful in discussions with the rest of the hospital staff. Co-operation between religious denominations was following a different pattern in America, where there were often several branches of one church. These were uniting within themselves, but in New Zealand there was more definite co-operation among different denominations. Mr Irwin said.

Fierce arguments in the United States about “medicare” seemed very strange to one who had come from a country where this was taken for granted, said Mr Irwin. He was horrified to note that persons could die in a hospital waiting room while medical staff investigated their financial situation to see whether they could afford hosnital treatment.

There was a terrific disparity of incomes in the United States and many more ways of spending money than in New Zealand. Good working relations between hospital staff and the clergy had impressed him when he returned to New Zealand, Mr Irwin said. People appreciated that there was a growing emphasis for clergy to seek out their parishioners’ true needs rather than to play on their obligations to be church people. Mr Irwin will be instituted as assistant hospital chaplain by the Ven. Archdeacon H. M. Cocks in the Christchurch Hospital Chapel next Monday evening.