Catholic Medical Quarterly Volume 61(3) August 2011
In this issue
CMA has a new website
Congratulations to the CMA on developing its new website. It’s bright, new and positive, and is at www.catholicmedicalassociation.org.uk. The CMA (UK) has long combined many functions, and these include
- Support and fellowship between fellow Health Care Professionals
- Growth in faith and prayer
- Advice for professionals who are challenged when they have to combine the personal beliefs and their professional work
- Advice and support for patients when they face clinician whose personal beliefs are not favourable to Catholic patients
- Advice, submissions and development work on a national and international level to develop, preserve and inform Catholic teaching within the wider health care ethics.
This year we have had two major, policy-making consultations on abortion from the Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynaecology and then from the Royal College of Psychiatrists. Organisations such as the CMA were not invited to respond to the RCOG consultation. A very careful review of the literature base evidence showed substantial difficulties with the consultation draft. The CMA (UK) has therefore presented a good quality submission that has been peer reviewed which we will share in the next edition. We believe that this will support doctors in making what we believe to be balanced decisions when women face a pregnancy they are struggling with.
As well as that, while writing this, we are all shocked by the televised suicide in Switzerland of a man with motor neurone disease who drank poison and walked with a stick to his death. We know that fear and a lack of hope is a central issue in a person’s desire to be killed or to kill himself or herself and that we have a really important piece of work to do in protecting the sick and bringing hope to those who fear death.
But if we are afraid, or uncertain, we will be less able to do that work. So the articles in this journal are, we hope, truly of use as we seek to build hope, truth and love within the professions that we care about so much.