AIBU to wonder WTF has happened to nursing “care” in our NHS?

[AnnieGetYourPun]

And don’t tell me it’s all Covid/staff shortages/staff illness related.

My niece was eventually admitted to hospital after being sent home twice from A&E (in agony) and is now on a gynae ward. It’s just her and an elderly lady on the ward. The elderly lady was getting agitated as she needed the toilet. The nurse came and said, and I quote “it’s alright, use your pad and we’ll come and sort you out later”. This has really upset my niece who’s dodging sepsis now, on the ward, on massive IV antibiotics/anti-emetics and IV analgesia. She has narrowly avoided a ruptured uterus as there was no one to do a scan on her, after a 12 hr wait in A&E. She is 32.

Nurses now... all of ‘em have degrees. All dead clever. Very few of them have an ounce of “caring” in them.

Fry me on here. I’m past fucking caring.

Should add. I trained in the NHS. Was a student/junior staff nurse/senior staff nurse/junior sister and G grade senior sister before retirement. Never, in my f***g life have I seen such lack of basic care and maintenance of human dignity than I have witnessed in NHS hospitals, in the past two years.

Shove your clapping and rainbows.

Yet unlike teachers nurses have never had a strike

...and exactly why they are treated like shit.

I'd fully support them striking, 1% pay rise from a government/cabinet/parliament of millionaires, an utter disgrace.

It is a disgrace.

@jasjas1973

Yet unlike teachers nurses have never had a strike

...and exactly why they are treated like shit.

I'd fully support them striking, 1% pay rise from a government/cabinet/parliament of millionaires, an utter disgrace.

This.

@Stompythedinosaur

Nurses seem to attract this weird dislike which other professions don't, apart from teaching

I agree with this, and I think it's misogyny tbh. There's a perception in female dominated caring professions that anything short of sacrificing your full self to the profession, anything short of perfect feminine self sacrafice is despicable. The same expectations (and levels of denigration when staff are found wanting) aren't applied in other places.

Totally agree and its the pillow fluffers of old who are the worst. They despise nurses of today who are skilled and its because they would stand there gaping and not have a clue where to start. I try to be kind and skilled before you all jump on me. Op doesnt reference any of the skilled work nurses do now because she wouldnt have a clue. How about administering a complex chemo regime op? Calculating the Cr clearance? Are the doses based on BSA ? What line do they need? Checking the doses are correct, the correct supportive meds, educating the patient and family? What about telephone triage of that patient when they call in at 2am? They come in with sepsis What are you going to do ? Give 3 take 3 ? Do you know how to titrate Inotropes ? CVCs? How will you manage them? All this while assessing the patients skin, nutrition, pain and documenting it all, and catching all the drs mistakes. Oh and you havent peed all day !

Id love to get a job where nurses sit around eating crisps
Where is this happening in a pandemic ?
Where ward areas are strictly monitored for IC and everyone is PPEd up to the eyeballs 😂

Total bullshit as usual !

Between my own hospital stays and many those of my dependants over the last few years, I have learnt one thing. Nurses are either caring and compassionate, or they are complete and utter bastards. No in between.

My mother in law was admitted to hospital in December 2015 after she broke her ankle. She was a 92 year old type 1 diabetic who required careful monitoring. When she was at home with us either me or my husband would check her blood regularly and adjust her insulin as required. Within 3 days of being admitted she was comatose. I called in to see her on my way home from work on day 3 but couldn't wake her up. I called the nurse who said that she'd been like that since the previous night and was probably tired. I looked at her charts at the bottom of the bed to find that they'd been giving her insulin injections without checking her blood first. Maximum dose 4 times per day after eating very little food. I hit the roof! Within 5 minutes there were half a dozen hcp's round her bed with one of them trying to squeeze some kind of gel into her mouth and setting up a drip. From that day until she was discharged 6 weeks later we paid for carers to go in 4 times per day for an hour each time to do her personal care, feed her, etc because she couldn't do anything herself and we didn't trust the hospital to not kill her. Once she was home with us, she lived another 10 months happy to be home with family around her.

Your niece and the lady on her ward received shocking care. My DD2 and everyone in her bay received exemplary care in early April. This isn't about degree educated nurses, this is about good and bad wards within hospitals. And it's also about the shocking lack of funding for staff in the NHS.

I was in a gynae ward quite ill with a post op infection. The nursing care was adequate from a clinical point of view, but horrific from a "caring" perspective. I was in pain and very scared, and had very painful dressing change procedures.

Sadly, I was literally bullied by one nurse. I am not sure why but she clearly disliked me. It affected me to the point of tears and it took me months to get over. I am still affected by it. I would complain but I am literally afraid of her, which is truly ridiculous I know.

When I was discharged I walked past the nursing station and I heard her bullying another nurse.

I hasten to add I had several lovely nurses on night shift who really helped.

I was discharged from a trauma ward this week. The care was mixed. Some were fab and some left a lot to be desired.

One HCA (admittedly not a nurse) spent the entire day shift asleep behind her computer with her back to the corridor so no one would notice and it looked like she was working.

The lady in the bed next to me was in her late 80s, had had a hip and like in the OP was left to urinate on pads. No one bothered to tell her she needed to request a bed pan or what the buzzer was for then they told her off for not using them! When I asked for help on her behalf I was scolded for interfering on the basis that she 'was of sound mind'. Appalling.

It's got bugger all to do with degree's and everything to do with good/poor management in the ward you are in. Some wards have a poor culture and twas ever thus even if the op claims otherwise.
I was the first of the new intake of diploma nursing back in the day and saw plenty of awful examples of "old school " type nursing as well as amazing nurses who became my role models.
One thing we learn from student nurses is that attitude is everything and unfortunately empathy is something you can't teach.

Agree re ward culture. If the ward manager aka sister/charge nurse has a bullying manner, lacks empathy etc you can bet your bottom dollar that will filter down to other staff members and some will take advantage of it. Likewise if a ward is chronically understaffed, care is inevitably affected, bad habits and short cuts become ingrained simply to get the work done. So much emphasis is placed on bl*y tickboxes to prove the work has been done, the patient gets neglected . Hence nurses spending hours sat in front of computer screens documenting that they've turned their patient 2 hourly yet not having the time to engage properly with the actual patient in front of them.

I think ward culture is huge. My (5 bed) room was right across from the nursing station and I heard non-stop talking and laughing all day and night. I am sure that had something to do with the lack of empathy. They only talked to each other, not the patients except as necessary. My attempts at conversation and relating to the bully were futile and just gave her more ammunition.

Lots of chat here about a nursing strike... and now they are striking!

@Sanguinesuzy good comment.

Mum and dad both died earlier this year so we've been in and out of hospitals for the last five years prior. Some was under covid restrictions so we weren't allowed in.
We've seen both extremes and everything in between. The worst was from one particular small hospital where the ward sister was what I can only describe as evil. Both mum and dad deteriorated on that ward. We should have put in formal complaints but when you're in the thick of it you don't have the headspace.
Elsewhere, in the larger 'county' hospital we encountered literal angels.
In the community it was hit and miss.

I should add that the petty tyrant was of an age who would have trained in the 1980s.
The staff in the bigger hospital would have had degrees for sure. And were infinitely better. But that's not really a reliable correlation!

And then there was the community nurse who came and checked me 10 days after giving birth. And declared 'you'll never be a girl again' after surveying my stitches. And it wasn't said kindly!
She was definitely old school!
But I think that's the problem - the bad stories really do stick.

‘Dodging’ sepsis and almost had a ruptured uterus because of a delayed scan?

hmmmmm.

I wish more people were dead clever.

It’s impossible to generalise, there are still some incredibly caring nurses, but I think it’s becoming rarer and rarer. Although, to some extent this is a wider societal problem too.

But I see it home and time again, medical professionals with a God complex but more Old Testament God than New.

Poor midwifery and obstetrician care contributed heavily to My PTSD. The attitude of many medical professionals unfortunately triggers it repeatedly. However some are wonderful and caring and I can never thank them enough when I have a good experience in healthcare but this is the exception rather than the rule.

I did get v annoyed with the clap for our NHS (as they destroyed my life).

The Nurses strike for a pay rise is a joke. Look at starting salaries compared with average graduates and the police who actually risk their lives every shift, have to deal with the unthinkable etc.

I agree.

the massive issue with the nhs is there isn’t enough staff. Wards are considered “fully” staffed at unsustainable levels. E.g 4 m/w to a 32 bed ward is “fully staffed”. So not only have you 8 patients to every m/w, then you have one abstracted to theatre to assist with elcs/emcs, which leaves 3. Then you have no resilience for annual leave, sickness, maternity, emergency leave etc.

that’s why I left. Loved the job, pay was actually decent, but I couldn’t manage the workload and feel I’d done a good job, and although my colleagues and managers did their best, taking leave was a fucking nightmare, and nearly always left some poor sod working nights on their own.

more staff, then you’ll find nurses have time to “care”, and not just firefight trying to make sure no one dies.

Degrees don’t make a good nurse either. Since nurses had to do degrees to qualify, medical science has increased, what you would have died from 20 years ago is not now the case, not sure what having a degree has to do with that to be honest.

Definitely not my experience. I was admitted last year after being bought in by wonderful paramedics, needed to stay in for 10 days and have a hysterectomy. The nurses were wonderful, as where the doctors and consultants. I suppose there are good and bad in every job. Also, people have bad days, stressful days upsetting days. It's not really fair to label all nurses.

When I hear the "nurses aren't better nurses for having degree level training" I always think that the person expressing that view might not really understand what nursing is.

Of course you don't need a degree to be caring. But nursing is not just a profession of making beds and being empathetic (though both those things are import). Nursing is a clinical role where a high level of clinical skill is required. Therefore training is very relevent. How do people imagine a nurse will assess a patient and know what to do without a high level of training?

Of courses nurses should be kind and caring, and my experience is that they mainly are, but there is a bit more to nursing than that.

Are you having a ducking laugh?
The strike is anything but a joke.
I have not had a pay rise since I have been qualified (a decade in Feb) despite moving up to a senior level. Tell me how you think that's fair or just?