By Bruce Best, Crosslight, the newspaper of the Uniting Church in Victoria & Tasmania
A Uniting Church minister in Melbourne has been appointed to a position that may be a world first – a chaplaincy based in an animal hospital.
Th e Rev Barbara Allen, currently dean of field education at the Uniting Church Theological College in Melbourne, will take up the new post at Lort Smith, the largest animal hospital in Australia.
It’s a chaplaincy for the people. The hospital has about 80,000 animal patients a year, euthanases about 300 a month that can’t be healed … and one result is a lot of human grief.
“At least 150,000 people a year go through here, including lots of kids,” says the Rev Ric Holland, the hospital’s chief executive officer, who also happens to be a Uniting Church minister.
And it’s not just pet owners who suffer. Staff – there are about 120 of them at Lort Smith Animal Hospital – can also be affected.
“Life and death are happening here every day, and that’s what prompted me to think about the need for a chaplain,” says Ric.
He encountered six people acutely aware of life and death standing outside the hospital in April, not long before the board meeting that approved the chaplaincy post.
Two sisters and their children had just been told that nothing could be done for their pet. “They were all standing around crying. They didn’t know what to do. They were in total disarray”.
Barbara’s responsibilities at Lort Smith Animal Hospital will include promoting the vital importance of the human-animal bond, being a resource person for staff and volunteers (several hundred of them), providing pastoral care, and offering appropriate funeral and mourning strategies.
The hospital can use that. It has all the facilities and frustrations of a normal human hospital: emergency ward (open 24 hours a day), operating theatres, recovery ward, kitchen staff, an ambulance service, outpatients and a morgue.
A walk through the centre shows dogs and cats hooked up on IV machines, dogs on the operating table, cats awaiting surgery, special receiving wards complete with special wash basins … and the worried humans.