Chaplain

NHS Lothian

Iain Telfer is a member of NHS Lothian Spiritual Care Team, based at The Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, an acute receiving hospital, whose specialist services include The Scottish Liver Transplant Unit (celebrating 1000 liver and 1000 kidney transplants this year); trauma and elective orthopaedics, cardiology and cardio-thoracic surgery; an acute stroke unit; hepato-biliary, renal, respiratory and general medicine; vascular surgery; with some medicine of the elderly beds; as well as a large maternity unit (the Sir James Y Simpson Centre for Reproductive Health), including a pioneering neo-natal facility. 

Iain was formerly a Church of Scotland parish minister in Glasgow and  Aberdeenshire; serving as a part-time healthcare chaplain in Canniesburn and Inverurie Hospitals, before taking up his present full-time post in 2001. 

He is currently engaged in a project, the aim of which is to develop a Patient Reported Outcome Measure (PROM) for Spiritual Care.  Having contributed to an initial NHS Education for Scotland (NES) sponsored research study in 2011, the tool was piloted in NHS Lothian the following year.  The Report can be accessed at www.snowdenresearch.co.uk  

At present (2015) the PROM is being rolled out across 10 NHS Scotland Boards, within the Community Chaplaincy Listening (CCL) Service, in the hope of demonstrating validity based upon a larger population sample than was possible in the Lothian study.

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