Why attack nurses?

I feel for nurses. I don’t mean the sort of nurses who wear fishnets and appear readily in a Google images search, I mean the sort which work in hospitals up and down the country. After a recent report from a nursing ombudsman, this profession is in for yet another bashing for reasons I can only think of as spurious.

The recent accusations that are levelled at nursing staff in particular relate to a small number of very select cases, where nurses have been accused of poor care for dying patients. You will understand that as a scientist I am suspicious immediately.

Of course it is difficult to watch someone die, especially if it is a loved one who is, by definition, irreplaceable. It must be impossible to know what to do or where to look or what to say. Perhaps that is part of the problem. Should people who are not trained in healthcare, healthcare provision or even medical science and who are in an emotional state be in the driving seat on NHS reform?

Nursing can, of course, be done badly. But this applies to teaching, train driving and fox hunting as well though. That, as we have seen is not a good enough reason to lay into it. The trouble is that nurses will not fight back. They are a compassionate race who, like medics of all kinds, are blamed when things do not go the way a sick person, or the relative of one, may wish them to. Let us try to look at it from the nurses’ perspective. They have hospital policy, a boss, a consultant (or more than one) and innumerable guidelines to satisfy. And you can bet none of them went into the profession for any of that.

Even on a practical level, you have a ward of people needing your attention, do you attend to them or do you sit at the deathbed with the family? It might surprise you to learn that relatives interviewed seemed keen for nurses to sit there with them without consideration of other duties. With the best will in the world, and even if it were practicable, is it reasonable to consider that this is what everyone wants?

All the cases are littered with such incongruities to the point at which one cannot determine whether or not any malpractice was evident. Healthcare staff of all sorts do a magnificent job, usually under very difficult circumstances. Will working against them in this way help anyone’s healthcare? I think not.