Maintain pressure on reforms to protect NHS
Simon Browes
United Kingdom
I am specialist community practitioner, completing a PhD in practice development research at the University of Nottingham.
Recent activity
Comments (3)
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Comment on: Private sector could control £2bn of community services within five years
The track record of local authority commissioning of private sector social care is patchy at best! Reducing care to inflexible, task-orientated, blocks of time and unit costs. Paying unregistered carers peanuts and requiring them to fund their own travel between clients. Could this be the future for community nursing if £2bn of services are tendered out in the next five years?
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Comment on: All-graduate nursing debate hots up as minister accuses detractors of sexism
Joining the nursing profession is a hard-earned privilege, not an entitlement and not a free-for-all. Just because somebody wants to be a nurse, does not meant they should be! Nursing is a hugely demanding role, if it is done well. That includes a large practical component, but practical skills are nothing more than learnt technical tasks if there is no independent body of knowledge behind them. That is what distinguishes a profession from a technical, semi-skilled occupation. Nursing has moved on from the days when it colluded with medicine as an obedient, subserviant workforce of single young women and the dedicated ageing spinsters! Widening the entry gate and reducing standards because you want to bump up the numbers and give everyone a shot is not going to help anyone! You cannot say that on the one hand you want to open the doors to everyone with a burning, romantic desire to be a nurse, and then complain that the end product is nurses who scrape through training and go on to struggle to practice independently, with the requisite knowledge, skill and confidence! At least the decision has now been made. We will move on and the nursing graduate will become the norm. Soon enough we will have something else to in-fight about. Post-graduate education and training will become the expected pathway for specialisation and progression, just like every other profession on earth. Maybe we will start to argue that our medical student colleagues should go back to the old style of training, working 80 hours a week and not spending so much time learning how to communicate effectively; or those overeducated surgeons, spending too much time pioneering minimally-invasive techniques when they could be doing it the good old-fashioned way? Perhaps not.
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Comment on: Trespassers on medical ground?
How very disappointing that yet another article talks about "tasks" and comparing specialist nurses to "junior doctors". It seems that the author has missed a very large point and a fantastic opportunity to promote the advancement of nursing. The title "Nurses v doctors" is inflammatory, inaccurate and offensive. Furthermore I strongly dispute the comments from readers that "the vast majority of band 5/6 nurses...[cannot] prioritise work effectively... safely administer medications... measure and record patient observations correctly or ... recognise the signs of a deteriorating patient." The vast majority of nurses are competent, conscientious and work beyond the call of duty every day. What they don't need is to take a very public bashing from colleagues. Shame on you.
