Great Post over at Mental Nurse...

of course all the posts are great at Mental Nurse....but this one is just good enough to eat.

Typical nursing care is coming in to a job that you don’t like and doing your very best to help people.


Typical nursing care is trying to do the seemingly impossible.

Typical nursing care is doing your utmost to work with a smile, while working somewhere that isn’t your chosen branch of nursing because there were less than 100 HCA/support worker/nursing assistant posts across the entire country last you checked, and you don’t want to leave your family/partner/social networks and move cross country for one of the few jobs available which hundreds of people are applying for.

Typical nursing care is providing the best care you can, when management are changing perfectly good consumables for inferior products creating potential infection risks, all because it will save a pittance over the course of a year but improve their financial management stats for the CQC.

Typical nursing care is trying not to grumble when your expected to do the same job for £3,500 less a year, despite the government saying people earning under £21,000 won’t face pay freezes or pay cuts.

Typical nursing care is having to courteously listen to people espousing their little stink nuggets of wisdom, despite their obvious lack of medical/nursing training or any experience WHAT SO EVER.

Typical nursing care is having to face patients despite wanting to cry, because you know you can’t give them the standard of care you know they have a right to.

Typical nursing care is looking patients to apologise, because unfortunately, accidents happen, as is the nature of being acutely ill.

Typical nursing care is not telling ungrateful patients to go fuck themselves, despite them making underhanded, disparaging comments like “that’s not [insert reason here] typical nursing care“, when your that tired, that thirsty, that sore, that sick of working on orthopaedic wards without proper manual handling equipment that you don’t care if the roof caves in on your head, you just want the shift to end ASAP.

These things shouldn’t be part of typical nursing care, but they are. And I hope the government, management or what ever all powerful deity is in charge of the NHS pulls their heads out of their collective arse before nurses get so hacked off that they get politicised.



All in all I’m pretty frustrated!

As am I.