I've been listening to Prime Minister's Questions.
David Cameron wants to introduce 'hourly roundings'. That is, that each patient under a nurse's care should have a 'nurse by the bedside, at least once an hour, checking that they have had water, that they're not uncomfortable, that they don't have bedsores....'
Let's think about this. One nurse can have up to 15 patients on a normal ward now. In 2003 as a Newly Qualified (ie. 3 weeks qualified) RN, had 12 patients in the morning, then 18 in the evening.
So, working with 15 patients. Each hour, the nurse must visit each of them. That means that the nurse has 4 minutes per patient, per hour.
What happens when patients need washes, morphine (requires two nurses to sign out, check, administer), theatre prep, admission?
AIBU?
To think that David Cameron is out of touch with the realities of the NHS?
Lougle · 05/12/2012 12:39
Have just been told by a family member that nurses who can't get jobs are found a job in the hospital by the government but, they aren't employed or paid by the hospital, they are paid by the government. Just a basic wage with no shift allowance with no additional training because they aren't technically employed by the hospital.
So they basically don't have very much that they can do, nurses require additional training (IVs and such) to do their job, this isn't happening.
So is this just so the government can say that there is more nurses than there technically is?
It was me who 
'd. I don't think we should have our taxes risen more just because our government can't sort it's finances out. Some of us are scraping by as it is. That doesn't mean I don't support more money going into the NHS - but raising people's taxes isn't the way to go.
"What is your definition of good basic care within a hospital setting Chris?
Hygiene?
Nutrition and hydration?
Medications and investigations?
Falls prevention?
It's all part of basic care in a hospital.
Unless you work in that setting, you cannot really understand the time constraints with so few staff. "
By good basic care I was thinking mainly of the things even an unqualified person could do. It is not acceptable for them not to be delivered due to staff time constraints. Double, triple, quadruple the staff (hence budget hence taxes) if necessary to deliver. (That's not to say I wouldn't support absolute standards for the majority of things that require qualified staff - I'm just leaving that argument for another day.)
The standard is, if you were taking care of your own sick child at home, one-to-one, what degree of neglect would you consider acceptable? How long without water, medication, toileting, cleaning? It is never acceptable for hospital to have lower standards than that.
Let me be clear, I'm not claiming this is possible on current budgets, I'm not in a position to judge. I'm merely stating what the standard should be.
Someone else was at my suggestion that we pay whatever it takes to achieve this standard. However most (admittedly not all) people have families and it doesn't make sense that just because we've out-sourced the job of caring from families we should automatically tolerate lower standards than if we hadn't done so. Most people do not spend very much of their lives in hospital, it shouldn't be a impossible burden to finance standards like these, given that the cost is spread over the rest of their adult life.
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