NRI nurse suspended for Christian advice to patients

An NRI nurse was suspended from his job after he suggested his patients to seek God during a training session at his hospital in Leicester, England.

Anand Rao, a nurse with over 40 years experience, was suspended by the Leicester NHS Trust after he advised two women who played the roles of patients to turn to God.

According to UK's Telegraph newspaper, Rao, a committed Christian, advised the "patient" to go to church to have her stress eased as she was role-playing being diagnosed with serious heart condition which she said created stress.

To another woman "patient" who had AIDS, Rao suggested, "In such circumstances when no treatment is available, the best treatment is prayer to God."

The 71-year-old Christian is furious that the comments made in a training session created the uproar that eventually led to his termination.

He rather feels his tutor should have corrected him on the right practices in palliative care.

Rao, meanwhile, has decided to take legal action with the help of Christian Legal Centre (CLC), an organisation providing legal support for Christians in the United Kingdom and lobby on their behalf.

"How is it possible that a nurse who has served the public for 40 years should find himself dismissed because in a training exercise he advised someone to go to church? To seek to censor and suppress this kind of language and belief is the fruits of a closed society," CLC director Andrea Minichiello Williams was quoted by the Daily Express as saying.

According to a recent survey, nearly two thirds of the Church of England's General Synod believe Christians face discrimination at work.

Of the 80 out of 484 Synod members surveyed, 63 per cent said they felt Christians were being discriminated in the workplace, while 59 per cent said they believed freedom of belief had declined in the last ten years.

The survey by The Telegraph was released just days after Nurse Caroline Petrie was suspended from work and later reinstated when she offered to pray for a patient.