A Comprehensive Guide to Religious and Spiritual Care for Sikh Patients in NHS Hospitals and Hospices

Dr. Satwant Kaur Rait is a Sikh with an insider’s knowledge of the Sikh religion, culture, and community. She worked as a librarian in Delhi and in the four local authorities in the UK, and acquired a PhD in Library Science. She served on the bench for nearly twenty years and has authored numerous books and articles. In 2009, after her husband’s illness, she became an honorary Sikh chaplain in Leeds Teaching Hospitals, recognizing a gap in chaplaincy services for minority faiths. Leveraging her professional background in service provision and delivery, she began auditing the needs and gathering the experiences of patients and their families using NHS services. Support from chaplaincy colleagues helped her learn and gain confidence, leading to the publication of A Guide to Being a Sikh Chaplain in 2013, based on her experiences with patients’ needs and concerns. Keen to learn, she pursued a postgraduate certificate (2011) and an M.A. in Chaplaincy in Health and Social Care (2015). Despite facing obstacles as a member of a minority faith, she explored chaplaincy as a topic of research. Her M.A. thesis on pastoral care for Sikhs was published as a journal article in 2017. She continued as an honorary chaplain and, in 2016, volunteered as a spiritual care provider and supported a bereavement group at St. Gemma’s hospice. In August 2017, she became a visiting Research Fellow at the University of Leeds. In 2019, she began working as a trained facilitator in patient education on cancer at the Sir Robert Ogden Macmillan Centre in Leeds. During the Covid-19 pandemic, she volunteered her services by phone to LTH and the wider community in Leeds. This decade-long volunteer experience provided insights into chaplaincy politics, treatment, and training, as well as the attitudes of recruiting managers, informing the revision and expansion of her book to encompass all aspects of spiritual care.