How Great Ormond Street Hospital's chaplains give solace to patients and parents of any faith

'We don’t have the answers, but we are deeply privileged to be helping people discover them for themselves'

From left: Rachel Heathfield, Jim Linthicum and Romana Kazmi (Micha Theiner)

It is not uncommon for Jim Linthicum’s mobile phone to ring in the middle of the night. He works at Great Ormond Street Hospital and, not long ago, it rang at 3am. Jim isn’t an on-call consultant, though. He is the hospital’s senior chaplain and leads its multi-faith chaplaincy service.

The call was to inform him that a little boy had died on one of the wards and, because he had prayed with the family earlier that night, they had requested his return to carry out a blessing before the child’s body was moved off the ward to the hospital’s mortuary.

“A lot of the situations here will feel as if there is no meaning. It’s a child who has done nothing wrong and a family who have done everything they can,” he says.

“Each family finds meaning on their own – we are not here to impart it but to travel with them.”

Jim is speaking in the ornate Victorian chapel in the middle of the hospital. Complete with stained glass and gilded columns, it is an oasis of calm, which holds only eight child-sized pews. It was completed in 1875, when Oscar Wilde described it as the “most delightful private chapel in London”, before it was moved in the 1990s to the space it occupies today.

What is heart-breaking about the beautifully tranquil space are the knitted toys, bears, rabbits and Disney characters that sit at the back. Each one has its own story. Some have been left by grieving parents, while others are placed there by children who have survived and are going home. In the nave, a prayer tree holds messages for sick children; some are critically ill and will never go home again. It is too intrusive to print their sad words.

The chapel may be a Christian place of worship but the hospital’s chaplaincy service, which is one of the many vital Great Ormond Street services that your donations will help to support, caters to all faiths and none.

“We are here to provide spiritual and religious care to people of all faiths and philosophies who find themselves here in their place of need. We don’t push ourselves on people. What we offer is determined by what families and patients need,” says Jim, 57, who is originally from Baltimore and became senior chaplain at GOSH in 2006 after tiring of the US healthcare system.

That approach has enabled Jim and his team of cross-faith chaplains offer solace to atheists, Christians, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, Hindus, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Jains. This takes place in the chapel but also on wards around the hospital, in a multi-faith room and a Shabbat room. Christmas, Easter, Purim, Sukkot, Hanukkah, Ramadan and Eid are all celebrated at the hospital, while the chaplaincy team also includes two female Muslim chaplains. Like Jim and the other staff, they take turns on call to support patients and families but also staff at the hospital.

“Several years ago, we saw there was a very real need from Muslim families in need of support, as well as a large number of Muslim staff,” says Romana Kazmi, one of these chaplains. “We see the same emotions and feelings in people of all faiths, so what we do is about human compassion. That’s why you might see me supporting a Christian family, or a Roman Catholic chaplain praying for a Muslim one, if the family wants that.”

The chaplains at GOSH also help families to work through ethical dilemmas that may arise from their faith, particularly where there is lack of knowledge about a medical procedure or treatment plan.

“Much of my work is around supporting families who may be deciding if they should take their child off life support.

“I bring all my religious knowledge and explain how faith can allow them to do this, which means families don’t feel like they are doing something outside their faith,” says Romana, who adds that she helps Muslims of many sects and respects different teachings and views from Islamic jurists.

Working with Jim and Romana and the rest of the team is trainee chaplain Rachel Heathfield, 45, who is on a three-year placement at GOSH after a career as a church social worker. Over recent months she has witnessed the support that the chapel team has offered Emma McCartney, the mother of James, whose fight against a rare immune disorder was featured in these pages last week.

She says: “The people who we see are here because they are desperate, or have nowhere else to turn, and are asking really big questions about life. People can be literally on their knees, shouting and screaming at God or praying for the first time with a new faith.

“We don’t have the answers, but we are deeply privileged to be helping people discover them for themselves.”