Minette Marrin revisited: She's still doesn't have a clue.

Minette just wrote an article for The Times. Check it out. I do not believe that she did one iota of research. She doesn't seem interested in getting the facts across. She seems more interested in getting a reaction. Okay I'll feed the troll. I am starting to believe that The Times is a worse example of journalism than the daily mail. Neither the times or the daily fail will acknowledge any letters or offers to write from Nurses who actually understand the situation. If they do, they get a nurse who retired 19 years ago which is pointless really because they don't have a clue. The only one that comes close to trying to present both sides is The Guardian. And believe me, it is tough for me to throw a compliment out towards a liberal anything. I wrote this in 5 minutes as that is all I had to get it in on time and felt I could have done better but I appreciated the fact that they published it.

We first met Minette here. Let's take her latest on nursing apart. It's so vile that I am typing with gloves on. The blue text is mine. The rest is toxic waste.

One of the government’s sillier initiatives was its announcement last week that in future all NHS nurses must have a university degree. From 2013, all would-be nurses will have to have taken a three- or four-year university course to enter the profession. The disastrous consequences of this ought to be obvious to the meanest Whitehall intelligence.

No change there then. You see Minette, for a person to become a Nurse...to legally obtain the title of Nurse and work as a Nurse....they already have to have 3 to 4 years of Uni under their belt either diploma or Degree program. And they have to put in thousands of clinical placement hours doing basic care and much more in order to earn their degree or diploma. Nursing care on the wards has gone south when management decided to replaced real live nurses with health care assistants. Health care assistants have no training, no education. They are not nurses in anyway shape or form. Just because someone works on a ward providing care and wearing a uniform does not mean that they are anything AT ALL like a nurse. Ian Dale and that dude who writes for Devil's Kitchen both say they worked as care assistants. They tell people that they were "nurses" once and are deluded into thinking that they have some kind of insight.

All sorts of people who might make excellent nurses will be put off, and lost to nursing: anyone who is not particularly academic; anyone who — frankly — is not particularly bright; anyone who has a vocation to care for patients without wishing for the most high-tech training; anyone who is unable to take on a mass of student debt on a nurse’s poor pay; any late entrants — and this at a time when the NHS is desperately short of nurses.


Minette. If they are not particularly bright they are not coming anywhere near me as my registered nurse when I am a patient on multiple infusions etc. I have seen too many deaths as a result of stupid mistakes by RN's. Hospitals don't want to hire registered nurses anyway. All they want to do is hire care assistants. Care assistants require no education or training, take no responsibility and are in a position to do more in the way of hands on care. And they get to wear a nurse's uniform. As a matter of fact if you want to care for patients without having to get an education or deal with anything technical then a career as a health care assistant is for you. A health care assistant also has a much better chance of obtaining employment on the wards.

Rare though it is for me to agree with any trade union, I believe the nursing unions Unison and Unite are right when they say that there is no “compelling evidence” that degrees for nurses would improve patient treatment.

Yes there is much compelling evidence. Do your research. Here and scroll down. Since when did Unison or Unite say anything intelligent anyway? Seriously. What the fuck do they know about any of this?

I have come across a great deal of anecdotal evidence quite the other way: that nursing degrees on a university campus with too little practical hospital experience have recently been producing graduates who are all too often, in the words of one consultant, “a liability on the wards” — not necessarily “too posh to wash” but often not much good at it, or at the important clinical observations that go with it.

Degree nursing programs are 50% practical hands on experience on the wards and 50% theory. They have to do thousands and thousands of hours of hands on practicals to earn their degrees. Otherwise they fail and do not graduate. Remember that nursing students at university spend much more time in class and on coursework than their non nursing fellow students. This is the case whether you are a diploma student or a degree student...the only two ways to actually become a Nurse.

And on top of that they have to do something like nearly 3000 hours of clinical placements. Any nurse taking 10, 15,20 patients is going to fail miserably. She can't read the charts, she is being constantly interrupted, she has to accomplish any task that comes her way in the 30 seconds she has between interruptions. Your dumbass consultant friend doesn't have a clue either. He is thinking back to the good old days where ever shift had a nurse in charge with a team of staff nurses providing care and he is comparing today's nurses (who are working alone often in horrid conditions, and sicker patients in a more chaotic environment )with his memories.

To say this is not to dismiss the value of demanding degree courses for any would-be nurse who is suited to intense academic and technical study. Such nurses should be able to take degrees and already can, though one might argue about the nature of the present courses: more than 25% of nurses already hold a degree.

Minette. Anyone who obtains the legal title of Nurse is going to be left alone with too many patients making critical life and death decisions. He is going to have to think fast, and think on his feet. He is going to have to have a hell of a lot more knowledge to do his job than a teacher, PC etc. That is why nurses in other first world countries are paid much more than teachers, policemen and social workers. Oh yes they are. A real nurse working in acute care will have to multi task and prioritise in a way that you are incapable of understanding. You do not fuck around with people's lives.

You seem to think that every person working on the wards providing care is actually a nurse. I think that you are assuming that all the health care assistants are some kind of junior nursing division. You are wrong wrong wrong. Anyone who earns the legal title of nurse will find themselves virtually alone on a large ward with only untrained care assistants who cannot do much. This is what you have to remember.

If I am a nurse on a 36 bed ward with 5 other nurses on duty then I have 6 patients to assess, medicate, take off orders, and care for myself. If I am a nurse on a 36 ward and my 5 colleagues are care assistants rather than nurses, then I have 36 patients to assess, medicate, take off orders, and care for myself. Have you ever tried to even keep the names of 36 people, their medical history, their diagnosis, lab tests due, and drugs straight for 36 people? Impossible. But this is the staffing matrix that management insists on. This is the current situation. This is the shit storm any newly qualified nurse is walking into.

I don't see you or the public up in arms about this. If you want nurses to provide care then why aren't you demanding that your hospitals staff the wards with nurses? You are the service users. So am I. That is why I am fighting.

However, not all would-be nurses are suited to a university degree; just as people vary hugely, so do nurses, so do the nursing roles they are fitted for and so does the training that suits them best. Plenty of the best bedside nurses are not academic, and much essential nursing work does not depend on the dizziest heights of training. There is more than one way to be a “supernurse”, and a degree is not enough.

Are you talking about health care assistants again? No, they don't need a degree and never will. They are the only people that the hospital wards will hire thanks to tight managers. But they cannot do the job of a nurse, so the few nurses left are just covering a larger number of patients who are sicker than ever. A caring, empathetic but thick person would be a disaster as a bedside nurse, but okay as a health care assistant. Remember that anyone who earns the title nurse will be left on their own making critical decisions that require a high level of knowledge. That is what being a bedside nurse is all about these days thanks to disgustingly poor understaffing and increasingly acute patients.

As the nursing unions said last week, “The emphasis should be on competence, not on unfounded notions about academic ability.”

The person who said that is brain dead. He/she does not understand what bedside nursing actually is, and probably confuses bedside nurses with health care assistants. Again.

The health minister, Ann Keen, has been making predictable noises about providing higher-quality healthcare, but the real motivation beneath all this, quite explicitly, is the desire of the Royal College of Nursing and the nursing establishment to raise the status of nursing, and to end the stigma of the “doctor’s handmaiden”.

No what we want is safe nurse patient ratios. I want a small enough number of patients to each Nurse. That will allow her to get the difficult stuff out of the way and do basic care herself rather than have to delegate to health care assistants because she has over 50 IV drugs and to give, a bleeder, and no one to help. The health care assistants cannot help me with drugs, bleed outs etc. I am managing that on my own for 36 people and the doctor on call is ignoring my bleeps. Guess who takes the fall when it all goes wrong. Me.

Nurses — or rather those who claim to represent them — want to have the status of professionals, on a level with doctors, and part of being a professional is having a degree. So nurses must have degrees. All of them.

All real Nurses needed to go through a hellish training at university already and it is very academic. Nurses are going to be working in chaotic situation that teachers and social workers cannot even begin to fathom. People die if nurse screws up. To call themselves nurses they must be registered with a professional body, the NMC, act like professionals and follow professional guidelines. They are accountable to society, their patients, their colleagues, and their professional body. They will be prosecuted in a court of law for a math error that harms a patient. And you don't want to call these people professionals?

So nurses must have degrees. All of them.

All of them indeed. For god's sake love. Your average 35 bed ward is only be staffed with one or two nurses anyway. The other 3 or 4 staff will be health care assistants. That means that even if all nurses have degrees most ward staff providing care will NOT have degrees. Let's see..what do we often have on the ward per shift as far as staffing... one nurse (either degree or diploma) on the ward and 3 care assistants....that would mean that only 1 out of four members of staff are actually trained and educated, even if all nurses have degrees.

They are saying that all nurses will have degrees, not all ward staff caring for patients. The term nurse is not a word that you hand out to anyone who takes care of people, unless you think it is still the year 1846. Nurse is a legally earned title. You are giving people the idea that all ward staff providing care are called nurses and will be degree educated. Not by a long shot love. A few weeks ago a patient of mine asked the health care assistant a question. She did not know the answer. "Damn nurses with their damn university training don't know a damn thing" said the patient. I jumped right in there and pointed out that the young lady was not at all a nurse and has had no training. Then I answered his question. Management brought the health care assistants in. Management did it. The nurses fought this tooth and nail. We lost the fight.

What’s particularly depressing is that this obsession with status is not unique to the nursing establishment; it has become a national obsession, of which this is just one expression.

It’s what explains the feeling that everyone must go to university now and the government’s determination to turn 50% of all school-leavers into undergraduates, regardless of the consequences. (There have been some suggestions that the government welcomes the idea of sending all nurses to university because it will effortlessly bump up the student numbers closer to the promised 50%.) When I was a child only very few people, and only those of supposedly high learning and intelligence, called themselves professionals and had concomitantly high social standing. Now, increasingly, everyone is described as a professional, even journalists occasionally.

No journalists are not professionals. You have to have some kind of moral code and be held accountable for unethical conduct to be considered a professional in my book.

If you want to read any more of Minette's rubbish here you go. Don't forget to check out the comments section. We are going to have a militant medical nurse competition. Post the dumbest comment that you can find from Time's readers and will can post them here and vote.