The head of the Royal College of Nursing has suggested that visiting times in Hospitals should be relaxed so that relatives can help with simple nursing tasks such as feeding patients and toiletting.
This demonstrates the degree to which the NHS has sunk and typifies what is wrong with the nursing "profession".
Over the last 20 years or so nursing has become a proffession demanding it seems, a degree no doubt placing great stress on important subjects such as gender, ethnic and cultural requirements.
In addition computer proficiency and the correct form filling will be taught.
This of course will leave little time for nursing, the TLC of making sure patients are fed and comfortable and not left in soiled beds.
That all is well on the wards can be seen every day on visits to relatives.
The university trained nurses of course will be there, sitting round a computer screen in between chatting among themselves. Being highly educated one can not expect them do do anything so demeaning as actual nursing. In any case there is not time for menial tasks such as this as forms have to be filled in and equality and diversity targets met.
The nursing functions are left to untrained staff, often from the third world who if patients are lucky can actually speak English. Some care, many don't and patients are often neglected.
Ward cleanliness, previously of paramount importance has often been contracted out and is performed in a desultary inefficient manner often by foreigners brought in on the cheap from third world country slums to whom sterility and cleanliness is an alien concept.
The matrons of old would have a fit, but never mind, all is well. All the forms are filled in correctly even if patients are starving, lying in their own filth and infected by the many pathogens which abound in hospitals nowadays.
The increased number of hospital contracted infections is blamed on the misuse of antibiotics causing resistance, and there may be a little truth in that. But before there were antibiotics infections were not so prevelant. There were no antibiotics for the bacteria to be resistant to.
But there was cleaning. There were dedicated nurses. There were ward sisters and matrons of whom all working on the wards were in fear.
Harridans they may have seemed to the junior staff, but the buck did stop with them and thus they ruled with a rod of iron, to the benefit of all, not least and most importantly the patients.
This new idea of encouraging relatives (if patients had them) to visit more regularly shows the contempt for the profession of nursing by those in charge.
They show a lack of knowledge of infection control by encouraging even more visiting as visitors often introduce infection into an environment where sick people have enough on their plate (not food it seems)recovering from their various illnesses.
Visitors are a great comfort to patients but I believe visiting should be restricted in any case in order to lessen the chance of infection on the wards.
It seems nursing has gone the way of the bin men I spoke about a couple of days ago.
The bosses talk about it and fill all the forms in and are judged to have done a good job.
BUT the actual work (in nursing and TLC) comes a very distant second.
And that is what is wrong with our country.
Too much talk and not enough action.
P.S I do not include the reception and out patient staff at Wigan Infirmary in this little rant. They could not be more helpful, but then they are all native Wiganers to whom civility and courtesy comes naturally.
