For being furious at DH telling DSD that my degree isn't a real degree?

[TooFarGone]

So DH is sat down with his DD taking about careers etc. He says to her "these days, you need a job that pays at least £20k a year but at the same time, you don't want to be stressing yourself out with difficult degrees and stuff. You want to enjoy your time at uni. That's why I think nursing would be ideal for you! you get to go to uni, you don't have to do a difficult degree and you get a well paid job at the end of it!".

So DSD says "But isn't a degree in nursing going to be just as difficult?" and he replied "no course not, they call it a degree but its not like a real degree".

I'm furious as I worked bloody hard to get my degree and he knows this. It isn't an "easy option" at all. I had it out with him and he apologised for upsetting me but still maintains that nursing is an easy alternative to doing a "real" degree.

I think cases where patients have died of dehydration are thankfully few and far between and I imagine the patients in question either repeatedly asked for water or were ill enough to mean that they should have been put on a drip. Neither of these were the case with Wamster.

Wamster was not ill enough to warrant being put on a drip and "too tired" (not too ill, or infirm or frightened) to ask for water. Not too tired to make observations and judgements about the nurses behaviour, but too tired to ask for some water.

I appreciate being in hospital is an unpleasant experience, but ususally beause you are ill. If you biggest discomfort when you are in hospital is mild thirst you are I think, pretty lucky.

If Wamster should have been put on a drip and wasn't or had asked for water and not been given any then I would think he had a case to complain. However he didn't ask for any water and wasn't ill enough to be put on a drip (AFAIK).

It would be lovely if each nurse had time to dedicate to ensuring each patient was comfortable and re-assured and I think most nurses would love to work in a world where they could devote time to each patient in this way. However, in the real world the wards are understaffed and the NHS is badly managed.

I am sure there are great nurses and bad nurses. Every profession has a range of people however Wamster has however been extremely derogatory about entire profession based on a bloody glass of water he was "too tired" to ask for. Wamster - your tiredness outweighed your thirst. I think thirst is a greater need than sleep, (afterall thirst will wake people up, you can die from thirst but not from lack of sleep) so if you were "too tired" to ask for water, you weren't that thirsty.

Gotcha Chen. It is an emotive topic, clearly. There's a ridiculous disparity in salaries and it really bothers me that the caring professionals seem to be at the lowest end of the payscale. It's not right at all. :(

Fuck me I'd be furious!!!! I have a first class honours degree in nursing, an MSc and a PhD and it wasn't easy. nursing is a bloody hard job and I found the degree (4 yrs, it was in Scotland) tough academically...and also more difficult because we had very little holidays (5 weeks in the summer as opposed to the months off that other students get) so had a work a lot during term time. It may have changed a bit, that was 15 years ago, but it was difficult. 7am starts, night shifts etc...on top of studying. NOT the easy option.

Iamabadger, I am basing my opinions on the water issue from cases that have been reported in the papers.

For example, this case:

www.digitaljournal.com/article/289784

and this one:

www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/7383752/Police-probe-death-of-hospital-patient-who-begged-for-water.html

But the reason that I have chosen to discuss this issue rather than ones I have personally experienced is because there is no way I could handle bringing up my own hospital experiences on AIBU. I will say that if many people were not witnessing family members receiving poor care in hospitals, they would not be inclined to believe media accounts like this.

I don't disbelieve the cases but I do think they sound a world away from Wamster being too tired to ask for a glass of water. I also think anecodatal evidence is not sufficient to degrade an entire profession.

MillyR Iamabadger has answered your question.

I haven't asked a question.

I've made some points, which are being considered irrelevant, because I'm only a patient or family member, so can't possibly know what I'm talking about.

That says it all really.

I live near an ex nurse. She is over 75 and lived through the creation of the NHS, never got a degree but worked in a wide range of nursing jobs both public and private sector at a very high level.

She is firmly of the opinion that nursing should not be taught as a degree course but as an on the job 3 year apprenticeship with specific technical modules in short courses. She is horrified by the way that nurses are trained, the jobs like feeding and cleaning they no longer do and what she sees as basic failures in patient care and in areas such as infection control.

My own view is far too many people do degrees and far too many jobs now require degrees to qualify to do them.

I think a nursing degree is pretty "on the job" MoreBeta?

a nursing degree is a mixture of theory and practice, hence in my post above where I said you don't get the same holidays as other students because you have to work on the wards as well. the theory and practice are closely linked

The digital journal one, sorry but I don't know if i would allow a man that ill to drink a glass of water either, he would most likely have been unable to swallow it and it would have gone straight to his chest. I would give him mouthcare and ask the doctors to ensure he had IV fluid prescribed.
As for the other one, I do not believe that he was not receiving some form of IV hydration. Brain tumours can affect the body's electrolyte balance significantly, and again affect your ability to swallow. He sounds agitated form what that very brief article says, again a huge risk when considering drinking. Again, I would give him mouthcare (wetting the mouth with sponges and using mouthwash and vaseline for the lips). That is what I meant by it not being that simple. I probably sound argumentative, but I love my job and I really feel that the media is actually causing people huge amounts of worry and stress by printing unfounded half-stories which panic everyone into thinking the NHS is "a killing field", as someone said on Mail Online the other day. To bring all this back to something relevant to the OP, how can anyone really think that anything would be improved by reducing nurses theoretical knowledge? Have all the opinions you like on health and the NHS, but I really don't think anyone in a non-medical profession can have any say on how we are educated.

I'm still reeling from the poster's comment that Oxford spoonfeeds students with weekly tutorials.

Have you no clue whatsoever?

I think the lady I know is saying that the first three years should be almost all about practice rather than classroom theory. She feels that people who go on nursing degree courses come out unwilling to job basic work such as cleaning and feeding. Much of that is now done by ancillary staff whereas she feels that nutrition. hydration, cleaning, infection control are the core of all nursing.

morebeta they dont do feeding and cleaning -hahahahaha-obviously we are all dreaming that we do these things on a daily basis are we?
The "old" nurses were trained to give basic care little else - patients didnt survive the way they do now.Now patients are living with very complex conditions and it is medical and nursing care that keeps them alive. I would love some of these "old " nurses to come and nurse on the wards now - I can remeber some of the things that happened in the "good old days" patients with massive pressure sores down to the bone .
The phrase" nursing eats its own" -so true

X-posted, but nowhere have I said what you are implying. So you know what, I give up. I'll just go on providing good care that actually has some evidence behind it, along with feeding, washing and cleaning people (because every ward nurse does this, it's actually impossible to work on a ward and not do it), and you just go on thinking whatever you like. You might like to know though, I have a diploma not a degree. Yet i still know some of that scary, complicated medical stuff that I'm probably too thick to talk about.

Is that not because the role has changed and now doesn't inclide cleaning and feeding, with these tasks having been delegated to support staff not nurses? I don't know as I am not a nurse but I thought that was the case and I do not think it was nurse led for that to occur as such, just that nursing became more technical and medically involved so the non medical aspects ceased to be part of the role.

Just what I assumed but I think that is the case. I do agree it sounds like there was a lot to be said for the days when a matron was in control of the ward and less was farmed out to 3rd party contractors so there was probably more control. I think the issues are not down to nurses though but to mis management of the NHS as a whole. I am coming from this from an ignorant outsiders view though.

folicacid thank you for pointing that out and I am very sorry that I said that. I had no idea at all that it was a prejudiced thing to say, I just thought it meant someone very naive until I just asked DP and he looked at me like . I haven't ever even used the bloody phrase, I haven't heard it for years and god only knows why I said it here and now. I apologise fully and I am very sorry for any offense caused, and have asked MN to remove the post.

He is BU. Nursing on top of doing the actual degree, you also need to work pretty much full time on placements.

We have support staff yes, because of the expansion of the qualified nurse's role. However, that does not mean we don't do any the essential care (I won't call it basic care, because it's not, it's fundamental and extremely important). But if having a support worker means I can spend more time with a critically ill patient who needs various medications and interventions while the SW washes the others, then I'm not going to make any apology for that! To be honest, my ward only really has one SW on at a time anyway, because we deliberately spend more on registered nurses, so we have fewer patients each and can do everything for them, rather than just the bare minimum to get them all through the shift alive. Which is what thousands of nurses elsewhere in the country have to do.

Another thing morebeta these students are being mentored by us nurses on the wards(Yes as well as provide care to patients we are responsible for teaching the next generation )-they wouldnt stand a chance of passing their placements if they didnt pass in basic nursing care-it underpins everything . I really wish people who have a" friend" who was once a nurse would actually think what damage their anecdotes actually do.
If you have a complaint about care you have received please do raise it -but stop all the generalisations

Hear hear Hermione!

I wasn't for a minute saying support workers.meant nurses were doing less. Just had made the assumption nursing was.now much more technical so if nurses could pass on non medical work they did so they could concentrate on the medical side

iamabadger one of the advantages of being an old gimmer ! I remember what it was like and am bloody sick of all the "it wasnt like that in my day"bollocks!

I can't comment on nursing degrees, but I do think there is an issue with vocational qualifications being made into degrees. There was supposed to be a Europe wide move to make teaching into a Master's level profession, but an MA requires a certain level of academic work - a dissertation and so on. Now, while people going into teaching would be capable of doing work at that level, if they only have a year to gain that qualification there is only so much time available. If you do more academic work, you have less time for other vocational components during that year.

So while I can see the point of making it possible for a PGCE to be converted into an MA or an MEd if the student does extra work in the next year, I don't think it would be necessary to replace the PGCE with an MA for all Secondary school teachers just for the sake of more academic qualifications.

If qualifications were set up based on what people actually needed to know to do the job, rather than having to met a certain set of academic criteria in order for the course to qualify as leading to an undergraduate or master's degree, then they would be more appropriate.

I don't think there is a point in making subjects into a degree just for the supposed reputation of having a degree. It would be preferable if society just valued vocational qualifications more.

Catgirl, I didn't think you were honest, I'm not as arsey as I may have appeared on this thread , you are spot on. I think that's a good thing, as nice as it is to pootle around washing people the reality is I'm generally trying to stop people going blue and dying on me, so if I get to do that and the others still get a wash then in my mind evryone's a winner! But you will always get the ones who think brow-mopping and handholding is a sign of being a good nurse. I'd rather my patients were alive and got to go home and be with their families than had a wash from a qualified nurse, when I have lovely support workers who do just as good as job as I do. When I was a support worker I used to put rollers in the old ladies hair . Thanks for sticking up for us on the thread!