Some of you may have been following the correspondence following the freedom of information request placed by the Herald newspaper and the Scottish Secular Society regarding the ministry of hospital chaplains in Scotland under the auspices of the Spiritual Care Departments. This represents yet another attempt by militant secularism in Scotland to question the role of religion in our society.
Canon Aldo, Fr Jim High and Fr Tom all had to submit statistics to the Spiritual Care Department NHS Tayside for the years 2012-2013 and 2013-2014 in order for it to answer this request.
Fr Tom made 627 individual ‘regular’ visits to patients in the hospitals in Perth and 62 ‘out of hours’ calls in 2012, and 585 individual visits and 61 ‘out of hours’ calls in 2013.
Canon Aldo would have made many more to Ninewells and Fr Jim many call outs to Stracathro. This means that people want to see the chaplains in hospitals. There are no statistics available for how many times secularists or humanists were called to hospitals!
The telephone numbers for the Catholic chaplains to the three main hospitals in NHS Tayside are:
Canon Aldo Angelosanto Ninewells
01382 611282
Fr Tom
PRI/Murray Royal
01738 622241
Emergencies
07960 127117
Fr Jim High
Stracathro
01674 672208