Nurses eating on shift...

[PatsyAndEddy]

Just back from hospital visiting a friend who had her tonsils out today. She had to fast from 10 pm last night and didn't get taken for her op until 2pm, that's a long time without food for anyone!

She missed dinner on the ward but they got her a sandwich but she's really sore and hungry!

On the ward her bed is right next to the nurses station. She said they were sitting munching on a large bag of kettle chips in front of her between the three of them. She commented on how she thought that was a but mean, they snapped back saying 'well we have to eat' at which point my friend reminded them that's what they're breaks were for.

I don't think she's flavour of the month in the ward! She can be a bit of a grump at the best of times but starving, sore and groggy I think she reached her limit!

We're the nurses being unreasonable, eating on shift?

^ Or as another poster put it so simply, if you want a system of 'the customer comes first,' then don't expect all the other qualities that really, really, REALLY^ matter with a HCP, such as empathy and kindness.

After all, it's 'just a service I paid for,' right?

Nothing more.

I'm an a&e nurse and regularly do shifts in resus all day and I am regularly in a position where I can't get a break or even nip to the loo. kindly the receptionists will sometimes bring you in a drink if it'd not busy and I've regularly had to hide behind a curtain folding a sandwich in 4 and stuffing it in my mouth. I'm not moaning about this though I do this job because I absolutely love caring for patients. all of them from babies to daft 18 year old drunks to elderly patients. I genuinely care about my patients and often nip to the wards to say hello to some of them before or after my shift.
I personally wouldn't eat so blatantly in front of any of my.patients but have eaten discreetly in the same area as them without being seen . I just hate thst threads like this turn into nurse bashing threads. I know there are some bad nurses out there but don't say all nurses are the same I personally love my job and know when I go.home at the end of the day I've tried my best. you get bad people in every job but don't criticise the whole profession

So it's reasonable to eat in front of people who are starving? I think that's downright disrespectful

I think that you need to define your definition of starving. I think the sense of entitlement conveyed here is ridiculous. Starving and being nil by mouth are totally different things.

Queen Spot on. I've never considered the gender perspective.

Married you are absolutely correct. Everyone should behave with dignity and respect towards others. OP's friend did neither of those things. She was a rude and disrespectful person. Is it not clear to you from reading these posts that it is rarely nurses individually that fail patients?!

I can only now assume you are bigot who expects the working class professions to dig in a get on with it without complaining....then and totter off home to clean their offensive grubby sweaty faces away from you. All the while being grateful for having a job and humbly accepting their lot in life.

I hope your son gets the opportunity at his RG university to experience real life before he embarks of his career, I really do. It'd do him some good and give him an education. Perhaps you should both go and do some volunteering together somewhere and then come back and see what your views are.
Do some reading on oppression and discrimination too. You live in an idealistic out of touch ivory tower. Perhaps your comments are disrespectful and oppressive to the people on this thread who are doing a job you know very little about? Have you thought of that? Your patchworked together statements and assumptions do not make a picture of reality. They make you sound like a bigot.

The private care I have had has been blasted by posters for being inadequate. Compared to the NHS care received by me and my family it has been better, it has been more organised, staff have been kinder and the facilities have been cleaner. The bedside manner of nursing staff between the two types has been the most markedly different. The doctors I have experienced on the whole seem to be equally polite wherever they are providing the care.

The NHS was founded to treat disease and it has grown into an overwhelming beast involving itself in almost everything but that. In 1947 care for serious illnesses was largely palliative, obesity was not an issue, addiction was not an issue to the same extent, abortion was illegal, IVF hadn't been invented. There is now a huge amount of optional stuff which is provided for which the NHS was not intended. On that basis I think there should be a basic level of care available to everybody but beyond that there needs to be an insured level imo. There also needs to be a cessation of publicly funded political correctness and layers of management (the PCTs for goodness sake) need to be de bureacratised.

Nursing needs again to be a profession which is well regarded but that is a two way process and I have seen too much conduct that I don't respect to hold it in particularly high esteem. That is very sad and perhaps I am very old fashioned but I don't expect to see nurses eating on the wards - or chewing gum, or having a fag in their uniforms on hospital premises. If that is happening because they don't have staff rooms, canteens and rest rooms or insofar as can be accommodated the statutory 30 minute break as required by employment law every six hours then those are matters that need to be taken up through the nursing unions and dealt with properly and every nurse should be signing a joint grievance delivered to every hospital trust in this country. And if there is evidence there is strength in numbers and something will have to be done.

I'm a nurse, and I think eating kettle chips at the nurse's station is quite frankly 'kicking ass' and no, they shouldn't have been doing it. Very unprofessional. If desperate, a sweet to suck on maybe, but not tucking into snacks like that!! Where I work, there's no way that would be allowed in any shape or form.

Thanks pleaidianpony. I do quite a lot of volunteering - far more than most thanks and a full time job too - until recently in the public sector. Something I don't do from my so called ivory tower is make personal attacks on other humans or on other posters.

Married you are attacking NHS nurses and to many that feels personal.

Isit, what,exactly is unprofessional about eating? So many people here making out it issomething dirty and to be ashamed of.

Yes, I agree with some of what you say married but you are coming from an angle that is elevated far far beyond the shop floor. To swoop down and drop a lot of sweeping ill informed statements about one individual situation is neither useful or a reflection of reality and also hugely insulting to the people that do the job.

I would urge you to spend any length of time in a situation that is corrosive to your health, well being and morale (basically one that is slightly oppressive) and not develop some compassion (and a significantly less judgemental attitude) towards people who might let some standards fall short. You clearly are privileged. Good for you, that's great, but imposing are views on people who's lives and situations you know nothing about is bigotted.

I am really of a similar view to you, I think some of what has happened is a cultural problem. It really pissed me off when I hear about people taking absolutely no responsibility for their health expecting to be entitled to x y z. It also really pisses me off that a nurse has had to spend a couple of hours moving that obese person around, hurting their back, and some judgemental person then critisizes them for having a bloody crisp or chatting to a colleague.

My personal experience, (again a snapshot) of private healthcare has been negative. A close family member was referred to a specialist surgeon at a very nice, celebrity ridden private hospital in north London. He returned home (with a very high temperature) having had inadequate aftercare, open undressed surgical wounds which had become infected. Following 2 weeks emergency admission and infection management at a local NHS hospital. I can honestly say that the NHS were much more pleasant, less rude and conscientious. Oh the only thing that was worse was the lack of private bathroom and the food didn't come on a silver tray.

Utterly,utterly unprofessional to eat in front of patients,visitors,reps,anyone!!!poor time management.What the hell is the state of the ward book and correspondence and the keyboard?Fatty food at the nurses' station in uniform!! Trying to justify it is ridiculous!What fresh hell is this?Next thing will be a coffee and fag!

Poor time management!!!!! Fuck off.

I rest my case!

Good for you. Hope it makes you feel self righteous and superior. Poor time management! How insulting.

Ffs. Get over it.

18 hours with no food is not starving. My 8-year old did it every weeks for months as part of cancer treatment. Your friend is a bitch.

I've worked for the NHS for 24 years.
Finally, I am moving to the prvate sector where conditions are better, workload is less, staff patient ratio is 1:4 compared to 1:10, nurses get breaks....
I will lose out on the NHS pension. But I can't live/work like this any longer.
Things were very different when I qualified. Patients were put before anything else.
Patients weren't as sick. They stayed in hospital for 10 days post surgery compared to 3 or 4 days now. We know more and can manage diseases better, so people are living longer.
Patients are still seen as a priority, but only as a cash cow. Do x amount of surgeies, get x amount of money.
More managers, less nurses.
We used to have brilliant auxillary nurses to help the qualified ones. Now they (HCAs) are being used to replace nurses. And there is a difference.

No wonder Marriedinwhiteagain likes the private sector better.....

I was once nil by mouth for 3 days and the patients in the ward around me ate 3 meals a day and do you know what .....I survived. Op you and your mate and other twats like you make me glad I left nursing never to return, life is too short to deal with shit you and your kind used to dish at me on a daily basis.

Well, in an ideal world, the nurses wouldn't be eating kettle chips in front of hungry patients. They'd have proper breaks where they could go to a canteen or staff room and eat there.

Sadly, the nurses don't get to work in an ideal world. The NHS workers I know only get "natural" breaks - so no break at all if things are busy.

Wards have minimum staffing levels - and this isn't necessarily related to the total numbers of nurses around, but to their seniority as well.

Not all wards have staff rooms. Some just have nursing stations / office areas that are fully visible to patients & relatives. Nurses on these wards have to choose between eating where patients can see them and waiting until they can leave the ward, which may not happen until the end of the shift. Even if they can leave the ward for 5 minutes, the hospital canteen might be at the other end of the hospital and on a different floor and too far to even get to in 5 minutes.

And not all wards even have staff toilets, which is pretty bad for any nurse who dares to need a wee while working a 12 hr shift.

So my sympathies are with the nurses on this one.

And plaedian if you want to bring my son into this and imply he has not been educated and has lessons to learn then go back through my posts. If we had relied oon the judgement of a midwife there would be no lesson for him to learn - he would be dead, yes DEAD! Thank God DH had the prescience to say twice calmly, "I want a doctor" and when there was a humph, I'll have another look to open the door and yell for help. Within seconds the head midwife was there who hit the emergency button and then there about 12. The 10 minutes it took to get DS breathing were the longest of our lives. It had nothing to do with overwork - I was the only woman in labour.

Attack me all you want but not my child because that is despicable.

Ah yes nurses only work 3 12 hour shifts in a row

I remember in 2003 working 7 night shifts in a row because we were so badly understaffed.

This is it Melty. The good nurses, who do think that kindness and compassion are part and parcel of their job end up leaving, precisely because they DO care, and can't bear the way things are done now.
I think that nursing, like teaching, is a vocation. If it is your vocation , you really want to help people, you want to do a good job and make a difference.
When you are prevented at every step from doing your job properly it must be so disheartening.

Married, your experience sounds truly horrific and traumatic. I am sure that it could taint your opinion of nurses and midwives, but there are tens of thousands of nurses and midwives and we are not all the same. I have devoted the vast majority of my working life to the profession and although I don't like the whole 'vocation' thing it is more than just a job, it is who you are and it is personal. Being acused of doing a bad job of it is, to me like being accused of being a bad mother, it is very personal. Times are hard for nurses at present, morale is low and this thread is deeply depredsing.

I'm realy conflicted on this...... I do think that non hcps don't have a clue about not getting a break at all for 12-14 hours.

The other day we were actually overstaffed (shift had been both covered internally and by agency). I got to leave the hospital at lunchtime for 40 minutes, I went to a shop and I thought that I literally could not remember ever having done this before. I qualified in 2000 ! For many office workers they take a 40 minute break in whichthey can leave the building maybe not everyday but at least once a week.

On the other hand kettle chips at the nursing station (not the office) during the day would definitely be frowned on in my place of work. There is a line and IMO bottles of water, coffee whilst writing your notes and chocolates in the office is on one side. Handing round a big bag of kettle chips on a day shift is on the other. But that's just my opinion.

Also agree that I wouldn't ever allow any member of my family to be treated in a private hospital. If you had worked in the PICU's of London neither would you. Far mote frightening than a few crisps.

More not mote

I was in hospital recently. A nurse or healthcare assistant came down from the ward to escort me from a and e back to ward (porter pushed wheelchair).

I had HG, been admitted for IV fluids due to incessant vomiting causing dehydration.

She walked alongside me eating prawn cocktail crisps and even rejigged IV bag (was on my kap for trip) with her crisp crumb hands.

I didn't say anything but wasn't best impressed. She was agency staff though and from overheard conversations the regular staff weren't too impressed with her for other reasons!