Welcome to our Professional and Recruitment Section. We hope this will be helpful both to serving [or prospective] chaplains and to palliative care organisations as employers.

We commend to you the AHPCC ‘Guidelines for Hospice and Palliative Care Chaplaincy, (3rd edition 2012)’ which can be found and downloaded from this page. It gives a concise summary of the chaplain’s role, and advice on recruitment.

Some managers may be aware of new arrangements governing the appointment of healthcare chaplains to acute and mental health hospitals within the NHS in England and Wales (http://www.dh.gov.uk/health/2011/12/appointing-healthcare-chaplains/). At present, these do not yet apply to palliative care units or independent hospices and it remains unclear how far they apply outside England and Wales. While this may well change in the future, our advice for now is to continue with current arrangements, using AHPCC members with specialist palliative care experience in a consultative capacity in the appointments procedure (as in the AHPCC Guidelines (2006) mentioned above).