The single most effective way of improving the care of hospitalised patients is the provision of good nursing care. Sadly, inexorably, over the last ten years there has been an exodus of trained nurses from the wards. The modern nurse-specialists do not “do” patient care. They are the “too posh to wash” brigade. They prefer to walk round with clipboards telling others to "wash their hands" whilst the real nursing care is delegated to auxiliaries, who call themselves nurses, but who do not have any real training. And there are not enough of them. So patients in UK hospitals are lying in their own excrement. The elderly ones become malnourished for there is no one to feed them. In this environment, MRSA and clostridium difficile thrive.
Now, a nurse-specialist writes in to NHS BLOG DOCTOR to reveal all.
[I am] …getting angry about the state of nursing, the lack of care, the prevalence of specialist and consultant nurses (God help me I am one). How did this happen to the NHS?It’s the top of Dr Crippen’s NHS wish list. It would be widely welcomed by the public. As a general election approaches, it would form an attractive and effective part of any political manifesto:
Please start a campaign to rid the NHS of specialist nurses...please save us from ourselves...
The nurse-specialist’s tale is here
Get our nurses back to nursing
