By ERASMUS
BY HER own lights, Sarah Kuteh was evidently convinced that she was doing the right thing. But some of the patients who were interviewed by this devoutly Christian nurse, as they were being prepared for big operations, felt disturbed by her insistence on bringing up her beliefs. One man, facing cancer treatment, said she offered him a Bible and induced him to sing part of a Biblical Psalm with her. It felt like a scene out of Monty Python, an old British comedy show, he complained later.
This week a British employment-law judge reaffirmed that a hospital in the south-east of England had been acting within its rights when it dismissed Ms Kuteh after she persisted, despite warnings, in having rather assertive religious conversations with patients. (It was sometimes part of her job to ask patients what religion, if any, they professed, but she had been told to keep such enquiries very brief.) The verdict was a nuanced one, though, which made clear that its aim was not to ban all talk of religion from the workplace.
