Our Chaplaincy team provides specialist religious, spiritual and compassionate pastoral care for patients, their family and friends and carers, and Trust staff, for people of all faiths and beliefs.

Royal Bolton Hospital has a multi-faith chaplaincy department to help meet the needs of patients while on the hospital site, with a chapel for Christians, a mosque with wudu for Muslims and a temple for Hindus. These are the main faith groups in the area, however staff will do their best to meet any individual faith needs.

Our chaplains also provide a 24-hour emergency on-call system for Roman Catholic, Muslim, Hindu and a generic chaplain for all other Christian denominations and those who don’t practice a particular faith.

Chaplains work with us to address religious or cultural issues which might impact on the working environment, patient diet or other requirements including prayer or rituals surrounding death and bereavement.

The team links in very closely with medical and nursing teams, particularly with respect to palliative care, end-of-life care, bereavement and maternity services.

The team offers both religious and spiritual care for patients:

• Religious care is the administration and participation in the religious rituals appropriate to the individual. This is conducted by a properly authorised person from the faith community from which the person comes
• Spiritual care is broader in scope and can be appropriate to everyone, regardless of if they belong to a faith community or not. Spiritual care is the exploration of the meaning and purpose of a person’s life in order to help them discover other pathways which may lead to a better situation with which they can cope

Contact the team

Chaplains can be contacted for Pastoral, spiritual, religious and cultural information during office hours Monday to Friday 7:30am to 5pm and Sunday 7am to 12pm.

Out of hours for urgent contact our wards can contact the chaplain that is appropriate to the patient’s faith through our switchboard (01204 390390), who will then page the chaplains.

During office hours please ring the chaplaincy office: 01204 390770

Email: neville.markham@boltonft.nhs.uk and catherine.binns@boltonft.nhs.uk

If you leave a message on the chaplaincy office answer phone it will be responded to as quickly as possible, although if left outside of office hours it will be the next working day before a response.

Community sites

Chaplains visit Laburnum Lodge and have plans to cover more sites in the community in the future.

Baby Memorial Garden

We have a community-funded baby memorial garden located on the grounds of Royal Bolton Hospital.

Parents can request a memory plaque for the garden by speaking to the chaplaincy team for support.

Each October, the annual Wave of Light service takes place in the garden and families are invited to attend.

In addition, the chaplaincy team host a baby remembrance service at a local venue each year on the Sunday after Mothering Sunday.