Last post on Nurse Degrees....for awhile anyway

We're all sick of arguing with nutters like Iain Dale and others who worked in a hospital once....so they say...... and weren't even bright enough to realise that they weren't actually any thing like a Nurse.

But I am posting this next piece because I think the author sums it all up quite nicely. This was written by a colleague of mine.

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I'm about a week behind the curve on this one, but I've been browsing through all the blog reactions to the news that all nurses will study for a degree from 2013, and alternately laughing and crying.

This is a desperately unfashionable thing to say, but I actually think it's a good thing. I trained in Wales, where nurse training is already all-degree. The news is only bringing England into line with Scotland and Wales. Contrary to what a lot of commentators are suggesting, doing a degree doesn't mean you spend less time on the wards while studying - whether you do a degree or a diploma, a student nurse has to spend over 2500 hours out on clinical placements before they can qualify.

Here's what Iain Dale (described as "insightful, informative and entertaining" by the Observer) has to say about it, in his insightful and informative way.

I once spent a year working as a nurse. There, that surprised you didn't it? Admittedly it was in Germany and was in a private clinic specialising in spinal injuries, but it was still nursing. I had no qualifications, no training and certainly no degree (it was my gap year).

So, Iain, you weren't a nurse at all. You were a care assistant. Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking care assistants; many of them are brilliant, but they're not staff nurses.

So when I heard this morning that the NHS was now going to insist on a degree before nurses could train, I was dumbfounded. Not all nurses are academically gifted and would want to do a degree. Does a degree in astronomy make a nurse better able to do his or job, than four years hands on training?

Nooo, Iain, they have to do a degree in nursing, not astronomy!

Then there's this guy, who despite being a doctor, still doesn't seem to understand how nurse training works.

The same is the case for nursing training, the ward hours and apprenticeship has been lost at the expense of satisfying politically correct mumbo jumbo spewed forth by educationalists.

But the ward hours and apprenticeship haven't been lost. I'm a degree-educated nurse, and I still had to do my 2500 hours on placements before I could qualify. I spent a hell of a lot of time running around wards doing hands-on nursing to get my degree.

Then I read Melanie Phillips article in the Spectator. Yadda yadda nurses don't want to nurse yadda yadda Florence Nightingale yadda yadda nursing is a vocation not a profession yadda yadda ...then I had to stop before my brain exploded onto my PC monitor. Though I understand this is a fairly usual reaction to reading a Mel Phillips article.

Right now there are many problems with providing nursing care, just to list a few:

- criminally low ratios of nurses to patients on NHS wards. I've heard of some wards where 2 nurses and 2 healthcare assistants were left looking after 35 seriously ill patients.

- more form-filling being forced on nurses in an increasingly lawsuit-happy culture - see also teachers, police officers and social workers

- advances in medicine making the job more technical. Florence Nightingale wasn't running around dealing with IVs, catheters, tracheostomies, all the while mixing potentially lethal medications

- an ageing population making the patients on the wards older and sicker, thus needing more care to keep them alive.


But what is not the problem is that nurses are getting too uppity because they've got degrees. All this is inverse intellectual snobbery that says that clever people can't be good nurses. My experience is that clever people often make for outstanding nurses. They think on their feet, they can problem-solve, they look at new ways to do this, they keep their knowledge and skills updated. All of these things are good qualities in a nurse.

As for the media stereotype of nurses who are too busy daydreaming about their next sociology paper to notice the patient's call bell ringing....they may well exist, but I haven't met any of them. What I have met repeatedly though is nurses who were rubbish at their job because they were ignorant, unimaginative and thick as a plank.

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Outstanding.

Melanie Phillips article here. Melanie, your ignorance is shocking. That goes for you too Iain Dale.