At 14:21 02/03/2008, you wrote:
>a Lord described Bath hospital nurses as lazy, dirty, drunken sluts. A nast=
>y remark by any standards and I hope for his sake he never has to have anot=
>her emergency admission to his local hospital "just a twice daily injection=
> of triplopen me lord". Mind u, traditionally a Lord should know a lot abou=
>t drunken sluts. takes one to know one. But i would have given anything to =
>be a fly-on-the-wall in the JHD mess that day. even more seriously, how do =
>i get admitted to that ward? personally i would rather be looked after by a=
>n honest drunken slut than any pious angel!
If this peer is criticizing the whole nursing profession that is
clearly ridiculous. Politicians would never do that any other
professional group would they?
Most of my patients have good experiences of nursing care, but enough
have less good experiences for me to think that nurses are not immune
to the same human failings as others.
Personal experience (personal and family) suggests that he quality of
nurses (trained, student or auxillary) is as variable as the quality of GPs.
If amongst nurses there are murderers - and there are - it is not
surprising that a few are lazy, a few are dirty and a few are
dishonest. Some are poorly (abysmally) managed, some are exploited
(in secondary and primary care) and some are just habitually incompetent.
The habit of talking over patients (when some nurses say they don't
have enough time to talk TO patients) is one that needs to be
broken. Of course there are times and subjects that are reasonable,
but it doesn't take a genius to realize that some discretion around
sick patients is appropriate.
Of course there are a stack of nurses around who deserve medals and
awards. Strange that civil servants and military personnel get so
many awards (leaving aside the VC type thing for bravery in the
field) and yet front line nurses and doctors get so few. Not even a
watch for 25 years service. We should do something about it.
Julian
PS Googled on Peer Nurses and got:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/02/29/nnurses129.xml
which does go on to illustrate a range of views, including some
somewhat sympathetic ones from inside the nursing profession.
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