I've been an Allnurses reader for too many years to recall; it was a recent post that pushed me into registering for the right to write: it was a very well-written article concerning a list of demands RNs might send their DONs. (Forgive me - I don't have the technical skills to provide a link, but I bet one of you can do it.)
One of those demands sent a chill down my spine. In essence, it said: the best-qualified nurses on the ward should not have to be distracted from their important work by having to deal with patients, hands-on.
Background: I am a nurse in the UK, 35 years come July 2, most of that time spent at the bedside. In between bedpans, I have been clinical editor at Nursing Times, nurse specialist covering three community hospitals, with the aim of raising clinical standards,a 'Government nurse' (working at our Department of Health as the lead on media relations and publicity around nursing), and as a project manager for a company called EMAP, which bought nearly all the main UK healthcare magazine titles in the late 1990s.
Since November 2004, I have been employed as a staff nurse, the lowest grade in UK nursing. I love it. I can't really afford it, but I love it.
Anyway. To quote Family Guy's Chris: 'What is the chase, and where do I cut to it?'
As I said, I've been following Allnurses for years. When American nursing gets a cold, British nurses sneeze; we have slavishly followed your educational model, and now we're on the path of giving the lead jobs to nurses with an MSc who don't want to get their hands dirty ('too posh to wash'). We abandoned enrolled nurse training (two years concentrating on hands-on practice), but now we are training 'clinical support workers' who are allowed to do dressings, give sub-cut injections, and are about an inch away from attending a half-day training course that will allow them to dispense medications.
From my experiences away from the frontline, I came to realise that the professor of surgery operates on patients regularly, while the professor of nursing might need to have the long fleshy things in beds explained to them ('we call them "patients", they chiefly get in the way of delivering care by your book').
Are we doomed over here, or are you fighting back?
