We’ve been developing a project to provide pastoral care in hospitals and prisons in New Zealand, for people who are not religious. Our current working group is: Sara Passmore, John Warren, and Peter Edmead.
Currently, all chaplaincy in hospitals funded by Te Whatu Ora is delivered by Christian organisations, and fails to meet the needs of a majority of New Zealanders. Without an alternative, non-religious people in these settings miss out on receiving the support and care that these services aim to provide. Data provided by Te Whatu Ora to the NZARH in January 2025 highlights that 90% of the encounters with patients in hospitals are with people who identify as Christian, and only 10% are identified as other than Christian.
About our project: Humanists UK has a successful model for training and delivering non-religious pastoral care. In April 2025, the NZARH purchased their materials to rebrand and revise the content so that it is suitable for a New Zealand setting. Work is underway to update the materials and deliver training for volunteers to pilot our approach. Alongside this we will engage with hospices and hospitals to identify the next steps to roll out a pilot in a few centres.
Here’s a link to our survey on pastoral care in New Zealand, this just takes a couple of minutes to complete: https://forms.office.com/r/28eqKsSCPZ?origin=lprLink
We’d love your help to get this widely distributed, so that we have some stats of our own to back up our starting position. We welcome participation by anyone living in New Zealand, over the age of 18. We want responses from all regions of New Zealand, from both religious and non-religious communities. Please support our work by sharing this short survey with your friends and family.
If you’d like to join us on this project, we’d love to hear from you at: office@rationalists.nz
Our working group meets online once a month. Currently we’re working on advocacy for the project, writing funding applications, and reviewing the training materials we’ve received from Humanist UK.