AIBU to think that Cameron is telling nurses to do things that they already do?

[MyNameIsNotNurse]

Or aim to do given the oppertunity.
Link

David Cameron's 'ideas'
Hourly checks on patients to make sure they have had enought to eat/drink and are comefortable.
Isn't this just basic care?
Also to have members of the public doing spot checks on their local hospitals, isn't this just going a bit too far?

I would really like him to do a 12 hour shift on a busy ward, with sick people needing more than just the hourly walk around to make sure that things are ok.
What about the patients who are in need of 15 minute observations. Patients with poor mobility who take more than 30 seconds to get to the toilet and needs assistance every step of the way. What about the drug rounds? Then multiply that by 30 pateints for 2 staff nurses (some with little experiance) If 1 patient is really ill thats 1 nurse down so 30 patients beeing looked after by 1 nurse, and maybe 1 or 2 HCA.

Why does he not discuss the staffing issues, which most wards have the mountains of paper work which each and every nurse has to get through every shift which takes away from the care of patients.
Most nurses I know stay behind to finish paperwork, turn into work when they or their family is not well, go without breaks, work 12hours a shift, do extra shifts and Given up our measily 3% payrise over 3 years.

He's just making a lot of noise saying we should do things we already do in order that the public think we're not doing them and we lose support?

I have been pointing out the problems with the selecting of students for years....

Coming into this quite late but I have to agree with the posters that say most staff are doing the very best they can Wight the limited time and resources at their disposal. I leave work (midwife) and cry in the car around 50% of the time after a shift. I ring the ward in the middle of the night after I have woke up with a freeze in my soul after remembering someone I have forgotten to do. Call me Davenport unfortunately has not got a clue about working in the NHS, he used the NHS as a megaphone when smarming about trying to get elected, all 'man of the people' I've had a poorly child etc etc (sorry but he used the tragedy of his sons death a lot when campaigning to show us about the wonderful insight he has into today's NHS). His wife even gave birth shortly into his leadership. In a busy London NHS trust you say? God no. Everyone knows how understaffed they are. they were on their holidays in rural Cornwall, smaller midwife to woman ratio you say? Wow. Who knew?

It's all very well being up in arms about the lack of basic care in hospitals. I for one completely agree it is wholly unacceptable but I just can't accept that in the main it is down to crap nurses/midwives. The system is completely unworkable under the current staffing levels, 50% more trained staff on the floor is what we need, the rare times when we have the right numbers on the ward we all walk around with a big smile, being pleasant to each other, calling good morning to our fellow co workers, indulge patients and deal with all tasks efficiently and with a smile on our face, we sometimes even get breaks. It's magnificent. And without fail we all comment on how nice it is and what a great day we've had. Visitors greet us warmly and we have a laugh and joke with those in our care and we go home with a lovely warm glow inside us at the level of care we've been able to provide. I'd say that happens about once every 3 months.

It is physically Impossible for many nurses/midwives to do everything expected of them in the time allocated. Impossible.

There is no explanation other than sheer rudeness and I wish more patients would address it there and then with the staff member. Taking your stress levels about under staffing of a labour unit out on patients is totally unprofessional.

I know that when you are ill and scared, it is the last thing you need or want to deal with but believe me, a few more public dressing downs of staff by patients would do some good when they speak to patients in this manner.
Done in a non aggressive but assertive manner, of course.

There is a link BTW between that rudeness and staffing albeit totally inappropriate to burden you with it.

Severe stress day in, day out caused by (amongst other things) working on a safety knife edge because of lack of adequate staffing causes burn out which eventually leads to a health professional behaving in an uncaring manner. Because they are spent.

Nursing Times Opinion Article
There is no doubt that there are bad, incompetent, uncompassionate staff working in the NHS. There is no excuse for this, and any decent nurse will try and report the "bad apples" because, really, they just make your job harder. No decent nurse wants to see or deliver bad patient care.
It is however very difficult to get staff diciplined/removed without hard evidence.
So people, complain, in writing .

There are a lot of decent hard working nurses and Health Care Assistants, and lets be honest, some of the HCAs are brilliant, (I learned so much as a student nurse from a wonderful Auxillary called Cecliy, and there are many more like her) but most of us are at the end of our tether. There is a limit to how much you can do when you physically don't have enough pairs of hands.
I have filled out many many incident forms related to poor staffing levels, but unless something bad happens, and you can directly link a failed recognition of a deteriorating patient to staffing levels, nothing will change.
The NHS is mostly reactive, not proactive.

I was agreeing with you stillsparkling that her attitude was totally unprofessional. However I have seen so many good, caring nurses slowly burn out to the point where they have been known to snap at patients, colleagues or staff. Yet they have been good nurses up to that point.

i am not cowed into defending the bad. If you have read the entire thread you will have read that I had to leave one trust because after blowing the whistle on an abusive, incompetent and racist nurse, I was bullied and victimised by his little clique. I try my best so set a good example and I deeply resent any implication that i am defending the bad. Since when does providing an explanation equate with that?

As for would affect so many more than it does-it cannot be had both ways. One minute it is being called 'endemic' and plenty of posters are implying that the NHS has gone to hell in a handcart because 'most' nurses do not care properly. Then you are imply that less nurses are affected either by stress ultimately leading to burn out and the attitudinal changes resultant than my post above describes.

Get Occy health research into nurse stress levels/burn out then come back and deny that it is a significant factor. Or read the post earlier where a midwife describes crying in her car regularly and awakening in the night panicking about whether she has 'missed' anything. That is not acceptable stress.

Mrs. Heffley you really don't know what you are talking about.

The doctors orders that they are following for medical treatments could cause a death if the Nurse screws it up. The nurse is usually so behind on her tasks that it becomes a game of rush. And neither the doctors, allied health professionals, social workers and families who constantly interrupt her are not going to let her alone for 5 minutes she can water her patients.

Can you imagine this scenario "Nurse hang an insulin drip and titrate it on patient A" says the doctor. "No doctor I can't because I have patients that need to be fed and watered"says the nurse. Nurse would get a total smackdown.

And sometimes jugs are left out of reach from elderly people because they are demented and will pee in it or pour it over their heads. The goal is to get around to them as often as possible and actually give them the water by holding the cup for them. But there are just too many of them. It's attempted but the Nurse keeps getting pulled in hundred directions. Same with food trays: for some patients if their food trays are left in reach they will dump the food on the floor and choke themselves. So to goal is to get to them and help them. But there are too many of them and too many interruptions.

Many of you have unrealistic expectations of the Nurses and also want your immediate needs wants met when you are in hospital,as if it is a hotel. When you don't get this, you get mad and accuse the Nurses of lacking in empathy. Nurse's HAVE to prioritize and triage constantly and if they allow their empathy to influence their decisions, they will make mistakes. Mistake that YOU would fucking sue over.

Nurses have to manage their time and tasks very carefully and if they allow patients to dictate where the Nurse goes, what she does, and when she does, huge mistakes will happen.

Therefore the Nurse has to be extremely firm with people in order to avoid critical mistakes. The patient's perception of this is that the Nurse is not empathetic. If they don't get what they want when they want it and damn all the other people that the Nurse is responsible for then they label the Nurse as "uncaring".

The problem with many of you is that A. you don't understand what the Nurse has on her shoulders and B. You cannot grasp what it means to be sharing one Nurse with a large number of patients.

Yes I remember the leader of the RCN blaming Nurse training. He is called Peter I think. He hasn't worked on a ward in decades and he doesn't know what he is talking about.

Most of the new grads cannot even find jobs and are working as bank tellers, checkout girls, and bar staff. How can you blame people who are not employed in the NHS for problems in the NHS.

Currently the majority of Nurses in the NHS trained under the old system. There have been hiring freezes in place for a long time and new system trained nurses are hard to find.

The problem is that you have too many unskilled non nurses on the floor and too few RNs (most of whom trained in the old days) taking care of patients who are increasingly acute. They do not staff by acuity in the NHS.

Wanting food after major abdominal surgery, help with newborns after abdominal surgery,measuring of urine(as instructed by a doctor),water,unsoiled sheets,moving after sitting in the same position all day,STs without tutting........ is not treating a stay in hospital as a stay in a hotel.

As still said so very glad you are not nursing in this country any longer.

I'm a midwife rather than a nurse, will often be looking after up to 15 women and their babies. Including poorly high dependency babies.

I have to prioritise looking after anyone who is poorly first. It could be a woman or baby that needs iv antibiotics, someone with high bp I'm worried about, a baby with low blood sugar, etc

Then there are the women in early labour who need pain relief, support, baths running, examining.

Then 4 hourly obs for the high blood pressure, other moderately high risk women.

Pain relief for post natal women.

Other drugs such as blood pressure lowering meds, steroid injections.

Breast feeding support.

Making sure the inductions carry on their prescribed regime of 6 hourly prostin gel.

Routine daily postnatal or antenatal checks

Blood tests, checking blood results, ringing drs to get patients reviewed, getting drugs prescribed, getting scripts off to pharmacy, ringing labour ward and begging them to take a labourer who is struggling.

Then there are the emergencies, babies born unexpectedly, someone having a bradycardia on a monitor, someone collapsing, having a fit, babies stopping breathing, secondary pph, etc.

And probably lastly the discharges.

At some point I also have to fit in all the little stuff, the requests for extra blankets, a vase, bottle of formula, toothpaste, a nightie, people's families ringing up and asking me to pass on messages about unpaid rent, social workers ringing up wanting info, people upset as their bedside tv isn't working, etc.

It never fails to amaze me how down right nasty some people can be when some of those things down the bottom of the list aren't done right away. Discharges are the main thing that bring out the worst in people. I can appreciate when someone is ready to go home they want to go but it just doesn't work like that. Even if the paed has seen your baby and your drugs are back from pharmacy I might not have the 20 minutes needed to do the discharge at that time.

I've had a woman threaten me with physical violence, call me a bitch, etc as she had to wait two hours for me to discharge her when she could see I was busy with a rapidly deteriorating woman in the opposite bed who was on oxygen, drs coming, loads of tests,obs, etc. And she thought I should leave the sick woman to sort out her discharge instead.

Last week a woman asked for a cup of tea outside tea round time. The woman in the next bed was in early labour and screaming like she was in transition. There was no way cup of tea lady hadn't noticed this. I told her she would have to wait as I was about to transfer the other person to labour ward. Only to be told that I could do the cup of tea first as the woman was only 3cm and wouldn't be having the baby anytime soon!

I am fed up with complaining patients/relatives not naming names and places.

It is nothing short of cowardly in my view. Nursing was discussed on Woman's Hour this morning and , as usual, someone was quoted after phoning in with yet another horror story of care but without naming the hospital / ward/ consultant or nurse.

Whingeing about 'the NHS' or 'uncaring nurses' is unfair when there are 400,000 nurses and 400 hospitals. Perhaps it is the same hospitals and nurse with most of the problems but we will never know.

stillorsparkling that midwife of which you speak was clearly in the wrong but she is just one out of many thousands. It's inexcusable but you can't then transpose that midwife's attitude to every other nurse and midwife in the country.

As an aside when a buzzer goes off I and every single other member of staff I have ever worked with goes to answer it, those buzzers are incessant and annoying and piercing and I dream about the bloody things, it is simply not feasible to leave a buzzer unanswered because it would drive the entire ward insane. I speak for where I work obviously but it leaves me open mouthed when people talk about buzzers being ignored etc as in my experience I have never seen this happen. I'll be honest, occasionally I will stop whatever task I am doing to answer the buzzer and if it's not something I can deal with quickly there and then I will add it my list of things to do an sometimes it doesn't get dealt with for sometime because other things take precedence.

It's difficult sometimes for lay people to understand the nature of what we do and the rang of things we deal with and that is totally understnadable, they don't have to understand what I am busy with elsewhere but a bit of insight into the fact that not all jobs/queries are as easy to solve as the ones you want us to do would be beneficial. That is not patronising and I apologise if it comes across as such.

Lastly people always trot out the "well I you don't like it then leave" but I don't want to, I want to be a good midwife, a great midwife, I want to care for people and for the women in my care to go home and say "oh my midwife was MrsJRT, she was great, really looked after me" but some shifts it's as much as I can do to go home an look back and think "well we all survived". That is not acceptable and we need to change that and maybe attitudes (of staff on the wards) will change too as a result.

Mrs. H, What you wanted was your own private duty midwife. The NHS will only pay for something like 2 midwives to 30 post natal patients recovering from childbirth and c-sections.

I am sure your midwife would have been in there tending to your needs if she could have. Are you even supposed to have food after a major abdominal surgery like that? Maybe a midwife can advise me. I know that at my hospital you are not allowed to have solid food for awhile.

The food thing really irks me. What would possess you to think that the hospital keeps food around for patients that the Nurse can just dish up? They don't. It makes me really cross. I would get patients admitted to my floor at 9PM at night. They had sat in A&E all day starving and now that they were on the ward they want a meal. Fine, except kitchen is closed and we actually have no food to give them. I would call my husband at home and ask him to buy stuff at sainsburys to bring in (paid for out of our own pockets) just to stop the yelling and complaining about "Nurses not bringing me food". We didn't even have a snack fridge at my hospital.

It sounds nuts that I had to send my dh out to buy food for patients but what they hell was I supposed to do when I had new admissions screaming because they wanted a meal and kitchen was closed whilst I was simultaneously trying to deal with orders and acutely ill patients? Here's your damn food, I sent my dh to the shop for it, no you don't have to pay me for it, now get away from me because I am drowning in orders. Of course that's not what I said but it was how I felt.

Management won't pay for kitchen to be open late or send up meals outside of mealtimes nor will they pay for a snack fridge for patients and then the Nurses get slammed for "not getting me food". Unbelievable.

And yes someone was upset with me last night as I wouldn't help her sit up after a section. Sorry, but no can do as its against hospital policy plus I care about my back far too much to pull people forward in the bed which is what a lot of people seem to expect.

There is no way I can pull a 10stone person up. I advised her how to do it herself and encouraged her, her arms worked fine so she could push herself up and infact as she was 12 hours + post section her legs worked fine as well.

But there is no way I'd have tutted at someone for asking. Ditto people asking for clean sheets, etc. I'd never tut, but would probably have to politely say I'd come back to them. Or send a HCSW.

No I didn't want my own private duty midwife I wanted a nurse to help me with my twins.I couldn't physically get out of bed to lift them both in.Nobdy would come so they'd lie there screaming and I'd lie there sobbing. When somebody eventually did come(moaning),they'd dump said twins and bog off.Errrr how do you put them back on your own when you can't move?It was bloody dangerous.I had one baby trapped at one stage and had to resort to picking him up with my teeth.

Re food all I wanted was breakfast off the breakfast trolley the next morning,then lunch.I wanted vegetarian food as requested and was warned if I didn't get there quick enough it would go.I was informed if I wanted food I'd have to get it myself.As I was rigged up to some saline drip I had to drag it down the corridor in pain,queue feeling very faint then somehow carry my tray back leaving my newborns unattended on a busy ward.They had alarms on their gowns but these could easily be unpinned.A baby had been snatched from said hospital in previous years and as a 1st time IVF mum after 7 years I wasn't that keen on leaving them for 15 minutes or longer.

I passed some huge clots onto the floor and was told these should be checked if it was to happen.I had to ask repeatedly,when someone did come they moaned(making me feel like shit)then left it there for me to step over.Dp had to clear it up in the end.

I ran out of STs and paper pants and was told I should have bought more.I had to ask every time for 1 measly pad,why they couldn't have entrusted me with a whole pack I don't know.It was an affront to my dignity to have to pretty much beg for them.

I could go on but you get the picture.

Don't get me started on help with bfing which was little more than a manhandle of my boobs,being told twin mums bf in the tandem position and leaving me to it.

No I didn't want my own private midwife just some decent nursing care and some dignity.

Still,

Either you read my posts and did not comprehend them or didn't read them at all. I am a pretty good Nurse. No one that I worked with or took care of ever said otherwise. I was able to score a job at a top hospital in the USA based on my record. Still get plenty of thank you cards from patients who know we are doing our best in trying circumstances.

You cannot continue to force your Nurses to be responsible for too many patients at once and then slam them for poor care. If you do not want to pay to staff your floors with RNs then you need to accept that Nurses are going to have to prioritize and triage rather than provide holistic care.

I think we have already established that the RCN does not have a clue about what goes on. People like Peter Carter are not on the frontlines. The RCN is useless and everyone knows it. Peter Carter probably doesn't even know that the working conditions for Nurses are like so how can we take him seriously?

You should have bought more ST's. For goodness sakes...

Mrs H,

AS far as I know NHS maternity wards do not hire Nurses.

Your NHS maternity wards are staffed with midwives and health care assistants. They do not employ nurses.

My hospitals did not hire Registered Nurses to work on their maternity wards.

What you would have had on that ward was 2 midwives and 2 untrained healthcare assistants to look after a large ward of post childbirth patients. So I will reinterate what I said before, you wanted one of those midwives or health care assistants all to yourself and damn the other patients who might have had worse things going on. I got neglected after I gave birth in an NHS hospital too. I nearly bled to death. The midwife was alone for 30 patients with only an untrained care assistant to help. It wasn't her fault. There should have been 6 other midwives on duty to deal with that kind of patient load. But neither the public or management wants to pay for that level of staffing.

Maybe they should hire RNs to work on maternity wards??? I think so.

But as a member of the nursing profession I get no say in how wards are staffed. If it were up to me I would hire RNs to work on maternity wards to care for patients needs and deal with medical issues and pain control while the midwives dealt with the maternity based issues.

I hadn't had a baby before let alone twins, I thought 1 packet of heavy duty pads would be enough. I'd remembered nappies,wipes and everything else.Obviously I deserved to be humiliated and made to sit in blood for such a foolish error.

No I didn't want somebody all to myself,I just wanted somebody/anybody(I couldn't give a shit who) to help me and my babies.

You really are a piece of work and sum up all that is wrong with nursing.