Unison's new campaign "HCA's are Nurses too"

Apparantly Unison has been handing out badges for  health care assistants to wear that say "HCA's are nurses too".

I have now had 2 separate people contact me and inform me of the fact and would like to hear from others who may have seen this.  I need a little more conformation before I really show you why I termed myself a militant.

If it is true it is criminal ,and I cannot believe that an organisation like Unison would be so stupid and reckless.  I already knew that they were absolutely useless and in business to promote themselves rather than workers.  But hearing about this has made me realise that they are actually quite dangerous.

The lack of real nurses on our wards is a public health crisis that maims and kills.  I do not care how nice an HCA is.  I do not care how hard working she is.  I do not care how good she is at doing a bedbath.  The fact is that 1000 HCA's cannot replace one Nurse.  Nor can more nurses make up for a lack of doctors. 

I have well over 5 years of university under my belt and I cannulate.  So where is my "Nurses are Doctors too" badge.  Yeah right. I'd throw something like that in the goddamn bin.  And that is what any conscientious HCA should do with her Unison badge.

I was an HCA once, breaking my back to do bedbaths and getting in a huff about being ordered about by Nurses who seemed every so distant to their patient's basic needs. I drew blood as an HCA.  I performed ECG's.  I was a senior nursing student at the time and the Nurses allowed me to hang drip bags (under direct supervision), suction, and apply 02.  I worked as an HCA to pay my nursing school tuition.   I took observations. I made minor assessments of patient conditions and reported them the Nurse.  99% of the time my observations were wrong because my level of knowledge was not fully developed.  But I tried.  I, too, thought that I was "just like a nurse".

Of course I was not allowed to legally call myself a Nurse until I graduated from University and two months later sat and passed the licensing exam for nurses.  Then I was legally allowed to apply for a job as a Nurse.  And this I did.  It took a week to get a job.  During that week I was still an HCA at my old hospital.  They offered me an RN position but the hospital down the road paid more.

The first thing that struck me when I qualified was just how every different (and more demanding) it was to actually be a Nurse.  It was like getting hit by a lorry. 

It was like my eyes suddenly opened to what was really happening on the ward and why. I suddenly felt bad and ashamed for my previous frustration with the Nurses I worked with as an HCA.  I felt mortified for thinking that handling basic care , taking a few blood pressures, and doing bedbaths on my own for a large group of patients was stressful, or anything like being a Nurse.  My god, there is no similiarity whatsoever. 

We know that a lack of real nurses on the wards is killing patients.,  We know that an increase in care assistants staffing the wards compared to Nurses leads to poor care, tragic outcomes and death.  We know that a lack of Nurses in favour of health care assistants actually leads to increased costs.  We know that hospital chiefs do not want to hire nurses for the wards and that they are not trying to hire real nurses.  We know that I am going to be on my knees as one Nurse to 15 patients and that this is the case whether I have 2 or 10 care assistants on duty with me.  To be honest, 10 care assistants would be worse than 2.  They don't know what they don't know and they interfere and they need to have an eye kept on them.  I pity any doctor who has to cover a large group of patients with only noctors to assist rather than other doctors for this very same reason.

When organisations like Unison run around handing out badges to HCA's that label them as Nurses it completely undermines the claims we make for more real Nurses on the wards.  It adds to the confusion of patients and visitors. Yesterday I was the only RN on the shift with 3 care assistants.  The visitors informed me that they thought I was the "Sister" and the care assistants were my " junior nurses".  I corrected them, but the fact is that public doesn't have a clue.  They didn't really understand what I was telling them about the care assistants not being nurses.  They couldn't understand why the fact that I was in an emergency stopped me from bringing their dad his PRN pain killers at that moment.  "Well matron, if you are tied up in an emergency can't one of your junior nurses bring the morphine to dad?" they said.

Sometimes I will see a group of visitors stare down at a 19 year old care assistant who looks decidedly unprofessional and I hear them say "These new university trained nurses look like slobs".  Ha.  If only the girl you were staring at was actually a Nurse, or had ever been to university I might see your point.  This may sound cheeky but more often than not, the real nurses do look very professional whilst the carers (who have no professional standards)  do not. Enough said about that.

If we are going to fix the problems with Nursing care in our hospitals we need to fight every attempt to undermine RN's and replace them with care assistants.  I love the care assistants I work with, I do.  But depicting them as Nurses is unfair to them, the real Nurses, and the patients.

I can cannulate, interpret ECG's and bloodwork, draw blood and listen to lung and heart sounds.  But I am nothing like a doctor.  I can do certain physical tasks but I cannot pull the whole picture together in the way that a doctor can.  And an HCA cannot pull the whole picture together the way a nurse can.

I am going to look into this further, and then notify the NMC and I hope they deal with it.  I know I would be prosecuted for impersonating a cop or a doctor.  Why should anyone be able to call themselves a Nurse?  It is not legal and this needs to be enforced.

Doctors, I suggest you get on board with this.  Do you really want to see band 5 staff nurses running around  wearing "I can prescribe just like a real doctor" badges?  Didn't think so.  It sounds pretty far fetched but the current efforts to dumb done medicine and nursing appear to know no limits.

It's not going to be long now before we have one real nurse covering every ward in the hospital.  The ward staff will consist of health care assistants who will throw everything back onto the nurse's plate.