Prayer, widely practiced in Britain and Canada by religious and non-religious alike, can be contentious in the public sphere, including in healthcare settings. Health research has studied the relationship between health outcomes and prayer (finding mixed results) but little research has addressed the lived experience of prayer in hospital settings.
Dr. Sheryl Reimer-Kirkham is leading a study on the expression of prayer in Vancouver and London hospitals to address this gap. The purpose of the project is to explore the ways that prayer is manifest—whether embraced, tolerated, or resisted—in public institutions, using healthcare as exemplar, and how institutional and social contexts shape how prayer is understood and enacted. The project involves ethnographic data collection with several categories of participants: repeat interviews with spiritual health practitioners (chaplains), including a walking interview to visit sites that are meaningful to prayer and research diaries in which the participants write narratives about prayer encounters; interviews with administrators, healthcare professionals (e.g., nurses and doctors), citizens (e.g., patients, former patients, volunteers), and community faith leaders; and consultation with a practice advisory group in each site.
In March, Sheryl spent two weeks in London conducting fieldwork, along with the UK research team at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and Kingston University London. A few things that stood out:
- Prayer takes various forms in hospitals, both formal and informal, corporate and individual.
- Both British hospitals have been intentional in creating sacred spaces for Muslim prayer. In one site, this involves a “tent” in the centre of the atrium where prayer can happen uninterrupted. In another site’s multi-faith space, a creative design has a Christian alter at one end and a Muslim prayer space at the other end, both of which can be curtained off for a “generic” sacred space. During fieldwork, these sacred spaces often had visitors and staff praying in them, and both had a mechanism for guests to write prayers (e.g., in a prayer book and on a prayer board).
- One hospital stands out in its use of art as a way to bring the sacred into clinical spaces, with art work on the walls and scheduled dance and music performances in the hospital atrium. For example, on the included picture, you see a large art installation that depicts the beauty of diversity and nature.
- In clinical care, healthcare providers and administrators expressed similar cautions as their Canadian counterparts about boundaries around spiritual caregiving, with British colleagues even more cautious than Canadians. This does not come as a surprise, given there have been two very public disciplinary proceedings over the years for British nurses who have prayed with patients.
- The common British saying “Keep calm and carry on” resonates with the approach to spiritual caregiving, where comfort and a sense of home are seen as important goals of care.
Fieldwork likewise requires openness/calm and resolution/intention.Early lessons of any ethnographer are that there is usually a subtext going on, that there is more than meets the eye, and therefore an openness and sense of curiosity are vital to learning more.
Data collection is nearly complete and the team is now deeply immersed in data analysis. A team Think Tank is planned for September, bringing together Canadian and British researchers. The project promises to be the kind of research that has impact on the future structuring of health services such that they are more open to diversity of expression.
*To read more about this project, see project blog at www.prayerastransgression.com
*Research funded by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council