While nurses no longer look like the image here I would like to defend the nurses I work with and managed for some time.
A Tory Peer recent;y made a statement in the house an extract follows
When I was taken ill, I was taken to an accident and emergency department in a hospital not in London but in the West Country. I can tell your Lordships only that it is a miracle that I am still alive. It was exactly as the noble Baroness described the hospital down in Maidstone in Kent. I will not tell your Lordships which hospital I was in, but the wards were filthy. Underneath the bed next to me was a piece of dirty cotton wool, and there it remained for seven days; the ward was never cleaned. It was a gastroenterology ward, with lots of people with very unpleasant infectious diseases. The ward, the tables, the beds and the bathrooms were not cleaned. I was extremely infectious at that time and no precautions were taken with me at all. The staff were furious when my wife wanted my bed cleaned when it clearly needed cleaning. I was just lying there, a pathetic person. It was appalling.
The nurses, who probably are the most important people in this complex area, were what I would describe as an accurate reflection of many young women in Britain today. What do I mean by that? I shall now break your Lordships’ rules and read the next bit, because I thought very hard before I wrote it. The nurses who looked after me—not all of them; we should never generalise and there were one or two wonderful ones—were mostly grubby, with dirty fingernails and hair. They were slipshod, lazy and, worst of all, drunken and promiscuous. How do I know that? If you are a patient, lying in a bed and being nursed from either side, the nurses talk across you as if you are not there. I know exactly what they got up to the night before. I know how much they drank and what they were planning to do the next night, and it was pretty horrifying.
While I obviously can't speak for the nursing staff in that particular hospital there are a few points that should be considered.
First is his rather sweeping statement about these nurses being an accurate representation of young women in Britain today, Just how many of them has he met? I would also like to wonder if the people he was describing were nurses ie qualified staff, you only have the right to describe your self as a nurse if you hold a registered qualification. These young women were probably very underpaid and over worked care assistants. While I agree that they shouldn't be exchanging gossip over a patients head I think to tar all "nurses" with the same brush is very unfair and should not be based on one experience. Working as a care assistant or Nursing Auxiliary as they are known in some hospitals is poorly paid and very hard work. They have to work all sorts of antisocial hours including nights and weekends.They have to give the majority of the personal care that patients need because the "nurses" time is taken up com pleating extensive paperwork, administering medications, planning care, meeting and liaising with the multidisciplinary team, doing dressings, supporting ward rounds, the list is endless. In an ideal world care would be given at the bedside by trained nurses, But they are an expensive resource, although they remain relatively poorly paid when compared against many other professions. The majority of HCAs in my experience are kind, experienced and very hard working people.
My next point would be if hospitals are not cleaned properly it is because hospital cleaning services were contracted out to the private sector in many hospitals; fortunately not in mine. Also if he saw there was a grubby piece of cotton wool under a bed why didn't he ask someone to clear it away instead of sitting there staring at it. If he was well enough to notice this he can't of been that "pathetic". I admit that there are lots of faults in the NHS but the majority of the time it provides an excellent service and staff work very hard to ensure that people get the best possible care. Resources are often wasted on attempts to meet meaningless and ill considered targets, See my post re Deep Cleaning.
