Nurses shouldn’t carry the bedpan for the NHS crisis

It was senior nursing staff and bureaucrats who were were cruel and callous in the Mid Staffordshire hospital scandal.

Like a lot of people at our stage of life, my friend Claire is negotiating care for her elderly father.

She is caught between the Scylla of a norovirus-infected ward and the Charybdis of a residential home where a room with no view starts at £650 a week.

Visiting her dad in hospital the other day, Claire was hailed by a young guy in the next bed. He told Claire that her father had not eaten for two days, but that he had given him water.

Meals were brought to the 92-year-old’s table, but they were left out of reach. No attempt was made to coax the patient to eat.

Nor was any comment passed on the untouched plate when it was taken away. “What kind of person doesn’t even ask an old chap why he hasn’t tried his lunch?” asks my tearful, fearful friend.

The shocking thing is such stories don’t shock us any more. They’re not even unusual.

When my mother woke up after her heart bypass last year, the first thing she murmured groggily was: “That poor lady opposite hasn’t eaten anything.”

If a heavily drugged elderly woman can see that another patient isn’t thriving, why the hell can’t a nurse?

Why does a sick young man have to crawl out of his bed in one of the country’s better teaching hospitals to put a glass of water to Claire’s father’s lips?

Surely that’s the nurses’ job.

Such dismaying neglect has inspired the Government’s plan to make student nurses spend a year as health-care assistants to improve compassion in the NHS and avoid scandals such as the 1,200 unnecessary deaths at Stafford Hospital.

You could practically hear the lips smacking with satisfaction in the Commons as Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt outlined his back-to-basics approach.

Get those uppity nurses wiping bums and we’ll soon have everything just as Matron ordered!

If nurses are “too posh to wash”, we’ll weed them out, and tender care will be restored to our hospitals once more.

Only it won’t. The Royal College of Nursing says the scheme is “stupid” and “unworkable”.

I agree. And why are nurses being made to carry the can – or the bedpan – for the Mid Staffordshire scandal? It wasn’t student nurses who were cruel and callous in that hospital; it was senior nurses and bureaucrats.

One idealistic junior nurse, who complained repeatedly that standards were dreadful, was threatened and silenced. Robert Francis’s report is quite clear that the human catastrophe of Stafford arose from a target-driven culture and a lack of clinical staff, particularly nurses, following the management board’s decision to cut costs.

Yet, apart from a new criminal offence to prevent the fiddling of waiting times and death rates, NHS managers seem to have ’scaped whipping for that entire tragedy.

Not to mention He Who Cannot Be Sacked, NHS chief executive Sir David Nicholson.

So who was responsible for a tick-box culture that ranked the completion of “tasks” above spending time with a person in pain?

Who decided that tasks that needed doing on a ward should be split into “essential and non-essential” and “medical or non-medical”?

Who cut staffing to dangerous levels?

Who was it that spent millions of pounds of public money silencing whistleblowers who were only trying to protect the public?

It wasn’t nurses, that’s for sure.

As the Telegraph revealed on Monday, more than 8,000 NHS managers are being paid stonking six-figure salaries.

This pampered breed skulk in their offices with luxuriant pot plants while nurses are dispensing complex medication, answering phone calls from vexed relatives, bleeping doctors who are too busy to reply, and trying to prevent a confused patient climbing out of bed – all of which means they can’t answer the call bell rung by another patient who needs a bedpan.

Oh, and then there’s filling in the paperwork to prove that they have, in fact, done all of the above. And people wonder why compassion is in short supply.

I’d like to see an NHS manager try to tend to a 22-bed ward (three bays of six patients, four isolation rooms) staffed by two very tired nurses and one care assistant with uncertain English.

According to a poll this week, two in three nurses think patients in their own hospitals are at risk of neglect.

The vast majority believes that managers put financial targets ahead of patient care.

Jeremy Hunt says he is keen for NHS whistleblowers to be treated fairly – but, in the same breath, rubbishes RCN claims that staff shortages are jeopardising patients.

Perhaps the nurses are blowing the wrong kind of whistle.

This is not to say that the RCN doesn’t need to be honest about the failings of some of its own members.

Making nursing a degree-entry profession was a disaster. It was like decreeing that motherhood should be for graduates only.

You automatically excluded many of the best and gentlest candidates. If degrees gave nurses more status, they also, quite understandably, made them less inclined to carry out “non-medical” tasks.

 It was about timesheets, not clean sheets. Too often, basic care became something you studied in training and didn’t do once you were qualified.

That explains why a 92-year-old gentleman has no one coaxing him to eat.

Forcing student nurses to do a year as healthcare assistants isn’t going to help Claire’s father.

Not if staffing levels remain the same. Changing a target culture that rates simple kindness and feeding an old person as “non-essential” might be a good start.

So would sacking some of the massed battalions of NHS managers and using their large salaries to employ more nurses on the frontline.

A good heart is essential for a compassionate NHS.

So are many hands.

Source The Telegraph