Angel-martyrs or useless ingrates?

Well okay, more probably somewhere between the two than either (aren't we all?) but an article in this week's Observer questions the received wisdom that nurses are always right no matter what their complaint or demand is.

In a follow up on the severe dressing down health minister Patricia Hewitt met with at the Royal College of Nursing conference last week, as reported in British Nursing News, it tries to compare the angry hecklers' claims with what goes on in their workplaces.

The resulting picture is one reminiscent of the episode of Yes Minister in which Jim Hacker tours a hospital held up as an example of efficiency and cleanliness, largely due to the fact that it has absolutely no patients to 'spoil' things.

Nursing is increasingly about an insistence on professional rights, rather than an insistence on a duty of care. Older nurses I speak to regularly tell me they are worried by the attitudes of younger nurses coming in who cannot do some of the basic tasks they were trained to do, but don't particularly want to learn.

One nurse in her fifties told me: 'Some of them don't even know how to spot a pressure sore. It's such a basic task, but they haven't been taught it. What I find hard to stomach is that quite a few have inflated opinions of themselves and see it as their job to challenge the doctors in everything they do.'"

Highly unlikely to be anything like the whole truth with regard to what may or may not be wrong with the UK's health care system, but a potentially useful source of perspective nonetheless...

A nurse's ideal place of work?

Image by Russell Weller via stock.xchng.