The Catholic Church is making progress in persuading the NHS to consider the spiritual needs of dying patients. But there is still resistance - and it is not confined to the medical profession

A cancer specialist has distilled what a dying person might want to say into the following five phrases: “I love you. Thank you. I forgive you. Forgive me. I forgive myself.”

Dr Elizabeth Toy, consultant oncologist at the Royal Devon and Exeter NHS Foundation Trust, made the point in a presentation to the House of Lords last October on what it means to die well. Dr Toy told her audience that everything her team does medically, socially or spiritually aims to create the opportunity to say those key words. And dying patients desperately want that opportunity. Two thirds of them (65 per cent) expressed spiritual needs in a survey by the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry.

Dr Toy is a consultant to a website, The Art of Dying Well ­(artofdyingwell.org), the Church’s latest tool for promoting the spiritual care of the dying and for calming people’s fears about death.
For many years now, the Bishops of England and Wales have lobbied the NHS to take account of the spiritual needs of dying patients. There is evidence of their success in guidance published last week by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice), to doctors and nurses on caring for people in their last few days of life.