This Woman Could Lose Her Job For Offering To

SAY A PRAYER

According to the BBC, Gordon Ramsey said the ‘F’ word 249 times in his show last week; that’s once every twenty seconds on average, and he is hailed as a ‘Celebrity Chef’. The same week Caroline Petrie, a 45 year old Community Nurse in Weston-super-Mare was suspended without pay by the North Somerset Primary Care Trust for asking a seventy year old patient if she would like her to say a prayer for her. 

The Trust said, ‘Caroline Petrie has been suspended pending an investigation into the matter. We always take any concerns raised by our patients most seriously and conscientiously investigate any matter of this nature brought to our attention.’ Why would anyone need to investigate a situation in which one human being offers to pray for another? And what does that tell us about the state of our society?

Now I know there are certain protocols that need to be observed in the medical world, and on the face of it, Caroline Petrie appears to have behaved in her usual professional manner. So there’s something here that should concern those who claim to espouse the Christian values of decency and fairness. The central characteristic of the Christian’s life is that they should be salt and light; salt of the earth as a purifying influence and light of the world to guide, to cheer and to dispel gloom. There should be a public outcry at the junk that passes for entertainment on our TV screens, and decent people should be deeply offended when a community nurse with almost twenty-five years service is at risk of losing her job because of the way in which she demonstrates love and compassion for the vulnerable elderly.

However, while decent people ‘tut-tut’ politely and get on with their little lives, we are entitled to ask; is there no one in the Christian church prepared to stand against unacceptable social change? Is there no one of stature in the community who will object and say to the Trust, ‘This time you’ve gone too far’? And why couldn’t someone have applied a little commonsense and said to that seventy year old lady, ‘Caroline is a good nurse who meant only good’ – is there no loyalty?

The world is going to hell on a handcart, and the tragedy is it’s not inevitable. The words of Edmund Burke come to mind again; ‘Evil prospers when good men do nothing.’

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