A final (for now…) post on the interesting shifts of culture and practice that might get state-supported health care and the church’s role at the heart of local communities finding common cause and networking together.
It could be a (quiet, slow) revolution in healthcare and it would not be the first time that church initiatives have altered the national landscape.
- The probation service was started by a pair of Anglican missionaries in the early twentieth century, and eventually nationalised.
- Educating the working classes was a job pioneered by the Christian churches, with both Catholic and Protestant examples. In the UK, Sunday Schools were teaching literacy and numeracy (and Bible literacy) to a quarter of the eligible British population of children by 1831. 1. (Schools until then were largely private, fee-paying and for the upper class and middle class boys.) In 1870 came the Education Act which made state education compulsory and a state responsibility.
- The hospice movement which had earlier (and largely Christian) precedents but in its modern form was established by the devout Christian Dame Cicely Saunders. So far the UK’s 220 or so hospices have escaped being swallowed by the NHS but at Dame Cicely’s death in 2005 were caring for 60,000 people in hospices and 120,000 people in their homes in the UK 2. Eight thousand other hospices followed her model around the world; part of the landscape for the dying. (Interestingly, Dame Cicely was a passionate opponent of assisted dying.)
- Possibly, hospitals themselves, invented early in the first millennium by St Basil and his fellow Cappadocian Fathers.
- According to Wikipedia
- http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4254255.stm.