The NHS

One of my favourite bloggers has made a reappearance after being missing for some time and she has come out fighting.

Militant Medical Nurse is a staff nurse who works on a medical ward and she must have been reading some of the bad press nurses are getting recently as she has put in her experience of meal times on the ward here. Go read it, it is a long post but it is exactly as I remember it from my time on the wards and is one of the reasons I don't do wards now, soul destroying is the word that springs to my mind, especially when she follows it up with this. Now, I don't know if Dr. Crippen at NHS Blogdoc reads this or not (don't really care) but it would be nice to know that instead of carping on about nurses he would actually do something. Instead of saying that nurses are not allowed a career path and promotion to practitioner we should all stay on the wards and wash bums and clean floors and toilets and bedpans he tried to complain to the people who matter in hospitals - the managers. For some reason he assumes that nurses are able to control how many nurses are on a ward, this is decided by manpower planning and/or human resources. If I as a nurse practitioner was forced to move back onto a ward as a staff nurse then someone would need to be paid off to make way for me to keep staffing at the levels they are funded. I will ask a question, when GP's and Consultants were given their brand spanking new contracts did any of them say "wait a minute, what about more nursing staff on the wards?" No? I thought not. What you do get is,...... Well read the last few paragraphs about ward rounds and mealtimes in Militant Medical Nurse's post.



A while ago I wrote a post about a parent who attended our department and was upset about my questioning her behaviour in not giving her child the MMR vaccine. It was such an angry post that I deleted it very soon after writing it. It now appears that perhaps I should have left it in place as the anti-vaccine lobby has recently had a boost from a broadcaster on LBC radio. When the broadcaster was taken to task by the excellent Ben Goldacre at Bad Science her lawyers immediately attacked him threatening him with legal writs. The full story can be found here and a follow up can be found here.

I would recommend Dr. Crippen's take on this at NHS Blogdoc as he has put the whole story much better than I can. It is only when Dr. C starts going on about nurses and nursing that I think he is an uninformed moron, on most things I tend to agree with him.