Nurses Taking the (chokie) Bickey

From the other side of the planet where I schooled and trained, the doctor is god: an omnipotent, autocratically patriarchic kind of god. Nurses are relegated as angels or cherubs. Angels are people of exceptional holiness. Like nuns or sisters. When some nurses holiness become nonpareil, they become Sisters. Cherubs are also special. They are an angel of the second order. They are most loved by patients because they coo and smile. In fact they smile a lot they grow their wings by smiling.

It is not always a good thing to be god, so most angels are quite happy to stay as angels. In other words, doctors are doctors and nurses are nurses. If a nurse wants to become a doctor, he or she goes to medical school. Yeah, he or she carries them heavy books and burns the eyebrows. You don’t become a doctor by being struck by lightning from mount Olympus.

Oh, the good old days. Nurses nowadays apparently don't smile, and I didn't notice this until I stumbled upon this blog by The Angry Medic. No! They don't.

Good Nursie! Here, Have A Biscuit.

I was so busy writing about The Melancholy Death of Evil Sperm I forgot stuff that really matters. I know that this will not generate as much comment as the previous post, but what the hey.

NHS Trust Offering Nurses Chockie Biscuits – to encourage them to smile at patients. This is actually quite funny.

In this part of the planet there are no such things as gods and angels: you are made to feel part of the team. This is a good thing, really. Most nurses are happy to stick to their roles and doctors do their own bit to achieve the goals of the team. Some nurses are given roles that obscure the demarcation between each role, and as long as they work within a framework that protects them i.e. defends them from danger, injury, loss, lawsuits etc., and with a fair amount of compensation for this added role, he / she is happy to oblige. Whatever the reason is:

To save Trust money – as it pays peanuts to hire nurses to do the job or to recompense for the shortage of doctors, the latter being highly unlikely, added to a lot of confusion and mayhem that bedraggles the modern NHS.

“In recent years there have been growing concerns about nurses who are “too posh to wash” and prefer to spend their time on administrative and technical tasks rather than basic care. Two years ago a resolution at the annual congress of the Royal College of Nursing proposed that nurses were now “too clever to care” and suggested that the compassionate part of their job should be delegated to healthcare assistants. The provocative motion was a reference to nurses increasingly concentrating on technical duties.”

The way that language * in bold italics here* is used in a country where political correctness is the order of the day, along with the rest of the article, I find it really naughty. Absolutely demeans the value of nursing and I suspect the reason behind the culture of disdain to what is now being perceived as old-school or traditional nursing:

Washing or feeding a patient is not posh or clever.

I have to admit, I have met quite a few nurses with this kind of mentality and they are usually not the clever ones. They don’t see the theory behind the importance of hygienics – the science concerned with the prevention of illness and maintenance of health, or nutrition, but see it merely as hands on activity not worth wasting a few brain cells with. They are also the ones who always like to nip out for a ciggie all the time as if that doesn’t waste a few of their brain cells but that is just my stupid theory, and I don't mean to diss people who smoke. Everyone's got a right to have cancer. As long as you get your work done, it's a free country.

I also see really brainy nurses who don’t wash patients. They only assess and make diagnoses (and debate with doctors) like Nurse Ratchet. They are a pain in the ass.

Fortunately, there are still a lot of proper nurses, especially in ICU who are very, very skilled, technically savvy, they could set-up a Galileo Ventilator and a PICCO machine blindfolded, line a Haemofilter in under a minute and still back –up all the data files of the main computer server, yet would be happy to do mouth care, eye care every four hours, make everyone a cup of tea, wash a patient at the end of the shift, then recite Shakespeare’s Sonnets backwards from 154 down to 1. But that is in Critical Care where if possible, patient to staff ratio is kept at 1:1.





In the wards, you see an entirely different picture. A Picasso painting of an abattoir where more than 30 patients are lying in their own filth, relatives curbing a fantasy to kill and one single nurse running round like a headless chicken.

So yeah, no smiley face here.