Out of the mouths of babes

I feel really bad for the decent cadets and health care assistants for writing this.  But the fact it is that many of them are not so good and should not be employed instead of Nurses.  They fact is that they will continue to be employed instead of Nurses.  Neither job seeking RN's who trained in the 70's nor new graduate RN's can find jobs on the wards. 

Here is the latest one from  the ward next to mine:

Patient became unwell in the night with..... let's say sepsis, very weak and has gone from able to attend to her own hygiene needs to being totally helpless.  This has happened very quickly.

Enter the auxillary, who has sat with the Nurse and "listened" to handover and all the information on these patients at the beginning of the shift. She  goes into the room.  I put the word "listened" in quotes because many auxilliaries, cadets and the like sleep through handover.  They just just get on with baths and forget everything else.

"You could wipe your bum yesterday, why not today?" says the auxillary to the patient.

I cannot convey how nasty and condescending she sounded when she said it.  A blog just cannot convey that.

The Nurse didn't know that this happened.  She was up to her eyeballs in drugs, orders, doctors rounds, discharges, emergencies, and admissions for her 15 patients while the auxilliaries were doing all the basic care unsupervised.  This is why we want RN staffing ratios to improve.  RN's all know that RN's must be involved with basic care.  This is true whether the RN trained in the 1970's under the hospital programs or in the 1990's under the hospita/university training programs.  It is the managers that do not understand this.

She found out when the patient's daughter came at her screaming and wanting to know how any "Nurse" could be so stupid and rude to her mother.  The Nurse gently explained that the auxillary "is not a nurse and doesn't have the knowledge but that is no excuse for what she said".    We have to say this to relatives a hundred times a day.

To appease the patient and her daughter the patient was transferred to my ward.  This is how I know about it.  I grabbed the non nurses (the only people I was working with that day, no other qualifieds) and I made them listen to me as I explained the patient's condition.

But the non nurses who come on duty tomorrow will again have a mini sleep during handover and the same thing may happen again.

Does anyone think it is funny that all these complaints about nurses being "rude"seems to coincide with the hospitals replacing real nurses with untrained people?