In 2015, the British National Health Service (NHS) required providers of health services to enable pastoral care for people who declared themselves to be of no religion. In response, the British Humanist Association (BHA), now Humanists UK, established the Humanist Pastoral Support service to train secular care givers. Once trained and accredited, BHA then enabled these care givers to support patients on request in hospitals and other health settings.
In August 2017, Lyndon Storey, then President of the Council of Australian Humanist Societies (CAHS), encouraged the Humanist Society to explore providing humanist carers in Victoria. At the time Lyndon had been practicing as a Volunteer Humanist Chaplain at Canberra Hospital for the previous two years. With several members expressing interest, Lyndon recommended the society get in touch with Spiritual Health Victoria. This organisation offered non-religious volunteers a short training course of five half days. During the final half day, participants underwent work experience under supervision in either a hospital or other health facility. Under the lead of HSV Vice-President at the time, John Russell, 10 people completed the training with Spiritual Health Victoria in November 2017. At the close of 2018, four humanist spiritual carers were working in three hospitals in Victoria, tending to the needs of the non-religious.
Network Formation
Although completing the short Spiritual Health Victoria training program led to a limited number of placements, HSV discovered that most local hospitals are unwilling to take on secular spiritual carers. This was even the case even where secular spiritual carers restricted their care to non-religious patients and where patients not identifying with any religion comprised the largest cohort needing care. This meant that in a few hospitals, those non-religious patients were not being visited by any member of the spiritual/pastoral care team. Research from the UK in 2018 found that many patients who do not identify with a faith community do not feel comfortable receiving emotional-existential support from someone who they perceive as religiously affiliated.
It was ultimately decided that a new, secular approach was needed to recruit, vet, train, support and place secular spiritual carers, similar to what had begun to take place in other parts of the world. For example, humanist pastoral care in Europe is being embedded within a variety of service environments. In July 2018, the HSV committee committed funds for the project and the Secular Spiritual Care Network (SSCN) was born.
Spiritual Care Philosophy
In 1984, the World Health Organization called upon its member states to include in their health strategies a spiritual dimension in keeping with their social and cultural patterns. The Director General, Halfdan Mahler, justified the innovation without referring to other-worldly beings:
The spiritual dimension is understood to imply a phenomenon that is not material in nature, but belongs to the realm of ideas, beliefs, values and ethics that have arisen in the minds and conscience of human beings, particularly ennobling ideas. Ennobling ideas have given rise to health ideals which have led to a practical strategy for Health for All that aims at attaining a goal that has both a material and nonmaterial component. … The spiritual dimension plays a great role in motivating people’s achievement in all aspects of life.
[World Health Organization Publication: Year 1991,
Issue 9290211407, Ch 4: The Spiritual Dimension]
Spiritual care (or emotional-existential support) has been found to be helpful for people dealing with transition, illness, trauma or loss. Such care can also contribute to positive mental and physical health outcomes. Spiritual Care is now widely regarded as an allied health profession, including within the Department of Health and Human Services in Victoria.
Network Aims
The Secular Spiritual Care Network (SSCN) initially aimed to create opportunities for secular spiritual carers to work alongside religious chaplains and pastoral carers in order to better serve the needs of non-believers. This was to include people who regard themselves as humanists, atheists, agnostics, sceptics, pagans, inter-believers, spiritual-but-not-religious, theologically fluid or who, for any other reason, tick the ‘no religion’ box. The objective was to place humanist chaplains in hospitals for the benefit of all patients, especially those who are religiously unaffiliated.
SSCN looked at developing its own credentialing criteria for secular spiritual carers alongside the main project aim of building out a roster of qualified secular spiritual carers with placement opportunities in a variety of settings, including hospitals, schools and workplaces.
To that aim, SSCN also worked to engage the Victorian Council of Churches Emergency Ministry (VCCEM) with the aim that people who do not identify as religious could be permitted to train in psychological first-aid and serve as chaplains/personal support workers in emergencies/disasters. VCCEM allows people of any faith background to volunteer for VCCEM Emergencies Ministry but, despite the organisation receiving most of its funding from government sources, VCCEM did not have a procedure for recruiting non-religious chaplains.
The embryonic Secular Spiritual Care Network also looked at workplaces as another opportunity for secular spiritual care services. At the time, Employee Assistance Program (EAP) provider, Converge International, was the only entity in Victoria that was recruiting people for chaplaincy/pastoral care positions to serve in workplaces. However, it had, at the time, only been willing to hire Christians for these roles. SSCN took a role in helping Converge International to broaden their recruitment to a more religiously-neutral approach to workplace wellbeing.
In March 2019, SSCN held its first two-day induction program for 13 people interested in working as secular spiritual carers. They included a psychotherapist, social worker, nurse, palliative care practitioner, and several experienced counsellors. This training had originally been planned in conjunction with Caulfield Hospital, but was cancelled after a decision was made by the hospital to no longer allow humanist spiritual care volunteers to visit patients at the hospital unless they had specifically designated humanism as their religion upon admission.
Social Health Australia
As part of the project SSCN sought to determine public preferences for spiritual care in healthcare settings, and submitted two questions to a market research panel of 16,000 people reflecting the demographics of the Australian public. The first asked what kind of support respondents would prefer in a time of crisis. Half the respondents (48%) said they would want ‘humanist social support’, while 14% of respondents opted for ‘theologically-informed spiritual care’. For the second question asking respondents if they ‘identify’ as religious, a full 62% said ‘no’.
Due to the constraints SSCN experienced in placing secular spiritual carers in a number of settings—mostly because of requirement for theological training and/or being in good standing within a faith community—SSCN began exploring other ways to provide an alternative to conventional spiritual care for people dealing with illness, transition, grief or loss. In August 2019, SSCN was awarded community grants from Bayside and Glen Eira City Councils to run an innovative program in support of older adults at risk for social isolation and loneliness. The program, ‘Meaning, Purpose, and Connection’, paired SSCN-trained volunteers with seniors in those communities to engage in arts and nature-related activities and guided conversations.
In order to diversify its base of support and to be able to obtain deductible gift-recipient status (DGR), which is typically necessary to receive philanthropic donations, the original iteration of the SSCN transitioned in September 2019 into a new organisation called Social Health Australia (SHA).