Re: Post Office Sell Off - Welcome To Tory Britain
 

The problem being Labour temporary raised the standard of living at the costs of billions of pounds of personal and government debt.
The standard has fallen dramatically as it was unsustainable and like all things, must be paid for.
Thus we have been through a long period of re-payment/recession.
When you consider how much Labour wasted in both financial and opportunity terms during their 13 years, I think history will show the Blair and Brown governments to be a colossus fail.

Re: Post Office Sell Off - Welcome To Tory Britain
 

C'mon is actually right here...he just argues it the wrong way. The Tories ARE screwing with the NHS, they are doing it like you or I would play a game of Jenga. They pull an innocuous piece out and five moves later the tower falls down.

Nurses ARE being canned, and it's being done very surreptitiously...they are being slowly replaced by healthcare workers, simply because they are cheaper to employ. Our own Flashy is a prime example, no disrespect intended here, but she has been taken off the street, put into a hospital situation, has a few days training and is already doing invasive therapy. Healthcare workers are what anyone over the age of 50 would call a 'nurse'. Healthcare workers are doing the job because they WANT TO HELP but are being used by the current government to supplant nurses.

Nurses have been forced to become little more than paper pushers, ticking boxes and doing constant training courses to maintain their credentials. They don't have time to change a bedpan, sit with an apprehensive pre-op patient or talk to a grieving relative, because they are too busy maintaining their continuous professional development, to satisfy the criteria of the Care Quality Commission. A lot of the young kids who have gone into nursing over the past few years have done so via university, they've done the theory but will never have an understanding of the practical, because they will be stood at a nurse station giving orders to people like Flashy and signing a form saying that they told her to do it.

I'm guessing that you went into nursing as a calling, because you wanted to be at the front end, helping and caring for people. That's what healthcare workers do nowadays. Nurses go to university for 3 years, come out and think the bloke in the end bed is a cantankerous, foul mouthed pain in the backside..the healthcare worker KNOWS he's scared and lashing out.

I want nursing by someone like Flashy, not a university graduate.

Don't get blinded and side tracked by the screw ups of Blair/Brown and the incoherence of C'mon. the NHS is in real danger from the current crop.

Re: Post Office Sell Off - Welcome To Tory Britain
 

I`d like to correct you on a couple of things guiness, firstly, Flashy will have at least an NVQ2 to get the job she did, so not exactly unqualified, and will probably go on to do her NVQ3 if she doesn`t already have it.
Secondly, HCA`s don`t replace nurses, although there are a few duties they may have taken on that nurses would have done previously, HCA`s are what used to be called Auxilary Nurses, changing beds, bed baths, fetching notes for doctors etc.

Re: Post Office Sell Off - Welcome To Tory Britain
 

Different awarding bodies had differing criteria for awarding the NVQ qualification, for example one body required the candidate to answer multi choice questions whilst another required essays and on the job observations. The optional units completed in the NVQ may not even be relevant units for hospital work. Nobody is going on to do their NVQ3, it's been replaced by the much better and more intense QCF which has appropriate bolt-on units required by the job role.

I know what the role of the healthcare worker is, and yes, you can kinda equate them to the old auxiliary, but as you say they are required to do more than the auxiliary ever did, the lines are being blurred. What is in effect happening is that nurses are becoming low paid doctors and healthcare workers are becoming low paid nurses.

I'm not denigrating healthcare workers, as I said, they are the ones I want looking after me. I'm saying that its they who are the backbone of the NHS not nurses, and when people bang on about nurses being underpaid and doing long hours, its actually the healthcare workers that are bearing the brunt. And, because to them, it's a calling, they just get their heads down and quietly get on with it.

The government is in a win-win situation, they get nursing care on the cheap and then the CQC do their inspections, write damning reports on hospitals and get them closed down or amalgamated, giving them ammunition to push for private health care

Re: Post Office Sell Off - Welcome To Tory Britain
 

Not exactly taken from the street and given a few days training was my point and the extra duties given to HCA`s, from what what I can tell, are things that you wouldn`t expect to need a nursing degree for. taking blood pressure, blood samples etc. freeing up nurses to do more important things and not be rushed off there feet like in the past.
Not when they get home they don`t.:D

Re: Post Office Sell Off - Welcome To Tory Britain
 

the pfi was put in law by john major I do admit labour should have changed it.. but that was the last government the way is forward with a new direction.. firstly re-nationalize the railways..

Re: Post Office Sell Off - Welcome To Tory Britain
 

you wont see this in the news pickle in a pickle Eric Pickles costs taxpayers £90,000 in attack on union - Media centre - PCS

Post Office Sell Off - Welcome To Tory Britain
 

Excuse me? We won't see it? Haven't you just pasted it?

£90,000, well, I suspect that is nothing compared with what they are prepared to pay just to keep in power.

Re: Post Office Sell Off - Welcome To Tory Britain
 

I can guarantee one thing that if the people of this country are conned into electing another profligate Labour Government, they will not re-nationalize the railways, just as they didn't renationalise gas or electricity, mainly because they know just how unpopular it would be, but this isn't really the problem with Labour, they just can't make an economic success of running the country, they always leave a disaster behind them every time they kicked out on their ear, in 1997 they inherited the best financial outlook of any incoming government in history yet left it an utter unmitigated disaster

Re: Post Office Sell Off - Welcome To Tory Britain
 

But they didn't ...they followed what was a tory based principle...as I said Labour are not red...they are mauve!

Re: Post Office Sell Off - Welcome To Tory Britain
 

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!

Re: Post Office Sell Off - Welcome To Tory Britain
 

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.

Re: Post Office Sell Off - Welcome To Tory Britain
 

I don`t know where you get your info Guiness, or what your definition of "just above" is, but HCA`s, depending on there pay grade obviously, are on way more than minimum wage.

Re: Post Office Sell Off - Welcome To Tory Britain
 

Hmm....ok around £45 for a 37 hour week before tax above minimum wage, and for nurses £150 for 37 hour week before tax above minimum...bloody pedants ;)

Re: Post Office Sell Off - Welcome To Tory Britain
 

By the way, if the NHS really want to save money on nurses, they should employ more of them. That way, they wouldn`t have to use agency nurses so much at £28/hour.