Quote:
Originally Posted by Margaret Pilkington
I have been at the sharp end of nursing for more years that I care to remember...and though I am now retired, I still have friends who were my colleagues. I know exactly what they do......they work their socks off to try to ensure that standards are maintained.
Nurses aren't just ticking boxes and pushing paperwork(yes they do fill in paperwork) - much of it is done at the end of the shift, when the nurse has made sure her patients have had the care that has been prescibed for them.
I have also spent a lot of time this year seeing my daughter be cared for...in intensive care and on the wards and in follow up clinics.
The nurses have many more technical skills...they insert cannula's, some even do operative procedures... they do jobs that were once the domain of the Doctor......the roles of the doctor and nurse are becoming ever more blurred...there are nurses who are clerking patients in at pre-op clinics, and prescribing drugs...but there are still nurses who will do a bedbath and help a patient who has toilet needs.
I am telling you what I have seen in the last few months...not what I have read about, or had the media serve me up.
The NHS is under extreme pressure for many reasons...not least of which is the vast numbers of people who have come into this country and expect to have their health care needs(which they would have to have paid for in their own country) met.
The PFI means that ever increasing amounts of the budget available for healthcare is being spent on paying back Balfour Beattie......if you want a light bulb changing, you can no longer ring the electricians department and get this done cheaply, it has to be done (at exorbitant cost) by Balfour Beattie's maintenance.
I don't care who brought the idea of PFI in.....Labour were in power long enough to make changes...and surely they could see that it was going to be detrimental on cost alone...but they did nothing.
If you can see something is wrong, but do nothing about it then you are culpable in much the same way as if you had done it yourself.
If you are unlucky enough to need nursing care of any description in the future...you might just be surprised at what those who have a university qualification do for their wage..and you might just be gratful for what they do!
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Margaret, in the main I think you are agreeing with me. I already pointed out that nurses are not doing the job that they are supposed to, they are doing more, they are doing the job of doctors and being paid nurses wages. The people who are doing the dictionary definition and traditional Florence Nightingale nursing are healthcare workers and they are being paid just above minimum wage. Trust me I am very grateful that ALL of these guys are around.
The point of contention between us is the amount of hands on basic nursing that university qualified nurses do. Like you I speak from personal observation not from political propaganda or watching Casualty. I don't for one moment think that nurses are useless, I just think that their role has been changed from the traditional hand holding, brow wiping and pillow pumping reassurance to triage, prescribing and having to maintain continuous professional development by going on countless training courses instead of being observationally assessed by the matron on a daily basis.
These changes have been made by the constant interference of government to get healthcare on the cheap and pave the way for private healthcare.
And once the NHS implodes, we will have a glut of university trained nurses who will be scrambling for jobs in the private sector driving down the wages on offer as supply exceeds demand. Like I said, win-win for this government.