How should Health Care Chaplaincy Negotiate its Professional Identity?

The question of chaplains’ professional status within health care has become a pressing issue in recent years. A combination of factors, including greater religious diversity and NHS modernisation, has served to put pressure on chaplains to account more clearly for their activities and impact. Changes outside the health service - including the 1998 Data Protection Act - have further added doubt to the suggestion that chaplains are a health profession. In an atmosphere of conflicting signals and statements I will draw on the work of Michel Foucault¹ to generate an alternative account of current difficulties, and point towards an urgent need for theological re-engagement.