Simon Browes

Comment on: All-graduate nursing debate hots up as minister accuses detractors of sexism

Simon Browes's comment 17-Nov-2009 8:34 pm

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.