I trained at a top school to earn my nursing qualifications. It was very academic but also very hands on.
We were taught that it is 100% the job of the registered nurse to provide hands on basic care.
We were taught that we should push hospitals to do away with most ancillary staff and that a patient is only safe with a registered nurse providing all of his total care. This can only happen if each nurse has a smaller number of patients. Our instructors were well educated and old fashioned. They foresaw the trend of more ancillary staff than registered nurses being used to staff a ward.
We were also taught that if we so much as miss a deteriorating patient, or infuse a drug late resulting in harm to a patient because we were giving out commodes ...then we would be facing serious legal action. It is a fact.
So what the hell happened? Why are patients starving to death in their own waste? We all know it is happening.
Hospital management has deliberately short staffed the wards in favour of trying to make a profit. On general wards, where patients are the most vulnerable, the nurses are overloaded with way to many patients. Providing basic care becomes so dangerous. The nurses are forced to make tough decisions about who gets care. The wrong decision could mean permanent harm, death, lawsuits and banishment from the nursing profession.
I am so alone. I am overwhelmed. I only have care assistants to help, and all they can do is basic care. I want to through all the other stuff at THEM and have a pleasant day bed bathing and feeding patients.
I have been a qualified nurse for 12 years. I know nurses. I know degree educated nurses and old fashioned nurses. The vast majority enjoy providing basic and feel that it is the best way to assess a patient properly and head off problems. THE VAST MAJORITY FEEL THIS WAY. The other .02% who don't feel this way are just nasty. Give me a baseball bat and some tar and feathers and I'll sort those few out myself. Throw the managers and the modern matrons in with them and I might sort several problems out with one swing of my trusty bat.
Look at what this silly nurse did. Silly right? What they hell are they teaching them up in Yorkshire?
Stupid and crazy actually...and insane and deadly?
She was an idiot. It is easy to see that she screwed up. But she was also under insane pressure. If I immediately stopped to fetch a commode every time someone asked for one, I would be in silly nurse's shoes. Every minute of every shift their are multiple people begging for the commode and multiple people deteriorating before my eyes. I have to make a choice. It sucks. If I get lucky and get a shift with stable patients and more nurses ......... my patients get great care including their basic needs met. It happens once in a blue moon that I get that kind of shift. That is my version of "getting lucky".
If she had ignored the commodes they would have complained about her and slammed her. If she had sent the care assistant to get the commode and went to the unwell patient then they would say that she is "too posh to wash". If she had left her patient on the commode to attend to the dying man and that patient fell of the commode because she left him unattended she would also have been struck off.
All you have to do is go to any of Britain's newspapers online. Type in "Nurses" and "too Posh to Wash". Look at the articles. I did a take on a few of these articles earlier in my blog:
You will be bombarded with comments from the public stating that any nurse who doesn't immediately stop to hand out a commode when asked "doesn't want to be bothered" and "should be struck off". No one asks how many other patients she has and what is going on with them. If I did nothing but commodes all day and ignored every single other thing I STILL wouldn't get around to all my patients in a timely fashion.
What the fuck is wrong with the public? Why are they not concerned about what is really happening on these wards?
First off all, you get people like this:
I like what they are trying to accomplish.
I want to see patients get dignified, excellent treatment no matter how old or infirm they might be. I want to provide all of their nursing care and do a great job and be super nurse. My colleagues are the same. We all want to be the nurse with the most thank you cards on the staff room wall. We all have elderly and ill loved ones who are in and out of hospital. We know....
But how these people are going about achieving their goals and how they are trying to "inform the public" is atrocious. Have a look at that link.
I accept that there are bad nurses. I have worked with nurses who were as ugly on the inside as they were on the outside (which is saying A LOT). They are not the majority. I have worked with 3 nurses who "don't care" out of the hundreds of nurses I have worked with in hospitals over more than a decade. I have met about 5 HCA's who were pure evil. This is out of hundreds that I know. No amount of dignity training will sort people like this out. They need to be fired. Give control back to the ward staff. We will sort them out.
But nothing will be achieved if we cannot do our jobs. Good nurses will continue to fail on an under resourced short staffed ward. If that is the case, how can we possibly sort out the few and far between bad ones?
Got to run now. I will lay into dignified revolution in my next post.
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