The state of Nursing within the UK; A rant.

Warning! I'm about to link you to the Daily Mail. I know, I know. So sorry, but I think you should read this article before you read my blog. It is HERE. OK then, lets preface this post - I'm a male nurse in training, and a somewhat proud feminist, and a thoroughly nice guy in my 20s who has the life goal of being happy and being good at my work.

The CQC have released a report telling us that in the UK 55 out of 100 wards that received a 'spot check' from their assessment teams did not meet the minimum standards required for nurses in this country. They tell us horror stories of how nurses were uncaring and failed to look after their patients. I've read a lot on the subject and have also read about all the theories on how we as a profession are uselessly failing our patients. Which is in my opinion untrue but none of my relatives are receiving sub standard care right no so perhaps I'm not as reactive as some other authors have been.

So we all just tried to survive that Daily Mail article and we learned a few interesting nursing facts. Lets start from the beginning shall we...


The author describes having had a pretty awful experience with her sick mother in hospitals, one which she recounted to Tony Blair who we all know was quite looking forward to reforming the NHS (before Labour realised it wasn't the right thing for the time and slowing everything down, obviously). That is her story; patients and their families hold tightly onto their stories and it is not the place of my blog to question any aspect of her experience. Tony promised he would reform the NHS and fix nurses. A somewhat patronising remark, but so we're told. The CQC report has proven a "widespread collapse of the ethic of nursing". I mean, if you read the data it doesn't actually tell us, or even allude to, more than half our hospitals failing, but I see how one might extrapolate the data that way.

By now everyone should have their Lady-with-the-lamp-radars going off. The article informs us that Florence Nightingale, the inventor of nursing wanted nursing to be a moral act, and that women should stick to what they do best - holding damp tea towels to the heads of patients and swooning in their corsets when the doctors walk by. Modern feminists, those miserable doc-martin-wearing-but-not-doctor-respecting so and sos decided that they should reform care. Apparently they decided that "caring" should be removed from nursing, equating it with being the doctors hand maiden. And with that strike, the nurses made their goal equality with doctors, women made their goal equality with men, and the whole NHS went to shit.

OK, let me begin part 2 of this post, which I shall entitle "Go Fuck Yourself If You Think You Know More About Nursing Than Nurses".

• The CQC do not tell us half of hospitals are failing.
• None of the articles have considered things that might make nurses feel less like caring. Maybe working 13 hour days for no money only to go home and care for their families will. Or giving up weekends and Christmas to clean human faeces and vomit at work. Or it could be that nurses are loaded with so many patients that it isn't possible for them to shoulder the emotional baggage each one brings and they're burnt out. Empathy training is suggested, but if nurses were more empathic we'd be continually crying and need nursing ourselves. Or more likely it's that we're uncaring bitches.
• Roman men were nursing as far back as the 3rd century because it wasn't women's work - it was for men. Florence Nightingale didn't invent nursing. Florence was big on hygiene but that was always part of nursing. In fact it still is, hospital floors are now generally cleaner than surgical tools back in her day. I wash my hands more per shift than the average nurse would have in a week 50 years ago. I have my own issues with Flo, but apparently she's the best attempt at a barometer of nursing ability we have.
• Why would nurses aim to be equal to doctors? We do very different jobs, so clearly that would be futile. We want to do better but not beyond our level. 20 years ago nurses were considered too unskilled to take blood pressure. I wish I was making that up - surely we can see how that needed to change, or do you want to wait 3 hours for an exhausted junior doctor to take your BP?
• Saying more female doctors means nurses are wrong in striving to be treated better is so full of shit I don't know where to begin.
• Nursing is a vocation? So what, I shouldn't be able to provide for my family because I'm a nurse? I should choose the life of a nun because it's my one true calling? No children or marriage for me please, I'm a nurse? Go fuck yourself.
• Nurses still do everything listed in this article. Does this woman's experience mean that all nurses are failing because I've been in more hospital wards than she has I'll wager, and I think she's spouting oral diarrhoea actually.
• I'm pretty good at what I do. I work my 13 hour shifts with a smile, being assaulted verbally and physically, missing breaks or not having time for the toilet, earning just over £6000 per year for my training (that works out at £3/hour unless I do over time when it plummets) and this article says I'm uncaring? I would love her to ask that face to face.
• At the bottom some real motives leak out - this isn't anti nursing, this is anti-NHS. Well, I presume so, otherwise the author would be criticising the NMC or RCN surely.

I am a very proud student nurse who works hard with the goal of helping patients for the rest of my working days. I don't see why my calling, my vocation, should be considered moot because of the CQC and I don't think anyone outwardly criticising modern nursing techniques should throw stones without joining me in my glass house of total transparency.