Nursing and the NMC

Nurses have been criticised for not being caring or compassionate enough so the Government say that in future prospective nurses may be asked to spend a year working as healthcare assistants, doing basic jobs such as washing and bed making.

O joy. Wrong problem. Wrong solution. Has Gove taken over at health?

My erstwhile professional regulatory body, the Nursing and Midwifery Council, is getting itself into a bit of a pickle.

A welcome enquiry into the way it regulates nurses is about to start, launched by ex-nurse and Minster for Health Anne Milton, after, but probably not because, the Chief Executive removed himself suddenly from the field of play in January 2012 and may or may not have trousered a golden goodbye. The NMC won’t say, apparently.

The Care Quality Commission has, once again, exposed the low standards of care inflicted on far too many elderly adults in the National Health Service. 20% of sites visited were failing to ensure dignity or nutrition for their patients, or both. One in five.

Yesterday's report from the Health Service Ombudsman about the inhuman care of elderly people in the NHS  generated  predictable handringing about the standard of nurse education in the UK. As in 'should be more of it'. Contrast that with a contrary view, also expressed, that nurses are now too well educated and think they are above contact with patients as that's too grubby, too menial.

Policy wonkery turns up in the most unexpected places. Today’s release of a report into the failings of care at Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust has flushed out another example. With the BBC reporting that hospital patients were left "sobbing and humiliated" by uncaring staff, poor care caused unimaginable distress and suffering, and patients had been "dying needlessly" one wonders, and then some, what on earth the nurses were up to.