Only lower class girls become nurses

[upsidelow]

I am a nurse, definitely from a working class background for which I am proud. I had it said to me that it's the poor or thick girls that become nurses. To be fair the person who said it did not know that I am a nurse but still...Is that what people think? That you don't need to be clever to be a nurse! I studied for three years, I also have post graduate qualifications too. My job is demanding and requires a lot of time and attention. I am not thick! Apparently bright girls being teachers...

Yes, I'm sorry to say this but I worked with nurses in my previous career and I did notice a difference between many of the older nurses and the younger nurses.

With many of the older nurses, I'd come away wondering how they managed to tie their own shoelaces.
(The sisters/ward managers were not like that obviously).

The younger nurses were mostly very different. And the ones who became Specialist nurses etc. were usually v sharp and conscientious.

Doctors are also unionised , as are most healthcare professions

Many hospitals have large posters identifying the uniforms - the uniforms are basically the same but different colour materials

I'd agree it's still a pretty common perception, that it's not that hard, and not seen as a profession by many people, that you basically swan into a hospital with very little work and it's easy to do so

Nah I know a fair few posh nurses and even more who were nurses before they married.

I know they had to pass exams and have placements. But it was an apprentice route. And jobs with an apprentice route do attract more working class people.
I am talking about fifties, sixties and seventies.
And in the fifties you could still start in a trainee position as a 15 year old, although you would have to go to college lectures and do placements.

There are clever nurses and some not so clever ones. Same with teachers and tons of other professions.

I’ve had four hospital stays in the past decade. Nurses are not only highly intelligent, they’re also a very special breed of human. I’ve never heard anyone say it’s for thick people. Mostly I hear people say “I couldn’t do that job”. And they’re right; most people couldn’t do it.

I think nurses are amazing, OP. Anyone who thinks they could “just do nursing” is deluded.

This was a view commonly expressed by male doctors 50 years ago. I'm astonished some are still insecure enough to believe it. It is plainly ridiculous and deserves no attention.

@Whyhaveibeencutoutofmamsnot Have you ever been really ill in hospital? I was far too ill to figure out and remember what the different uniforms meant. I knew porter, catering assistant, nurse and Dr. That is as much as I could cognitively manage as I was ill. Similarly when my mother was dying in hospital I was also not able to cognitively deal with matching up uniforms to job titles.

Nursing always used to be a very middle class occupation so this is new to me, I don't think anyone really believes this.

When I had dc my mum came to visit.

she was old school hospital admin back in the days when nurse ranks were very important, all the way up to matron.

she saw the navy uniform and automatically addressed the nurse as “sister”. To be roundly told that she was not a sister she was a midwife.

so even dept to dept uniforms can carry different titles.

from memory - green SEN- do we even have those any more? Have they evolved to HCA’s?

HCA’s brown or beige

light blue staff nurse
dark blue sister/charge nurse.

presumably m/w now wear dark blue as their roles are more autonomous so there aren’t really staff nurses. Hca’s, m/w, then ward managers.

I think there's lots going on here.

One is that female dominated professions are always devalued- so nurses, childcare, carers, teachers. You can see this as teachers have stopped being a male dominated profession that clever boys went into and became dominated by clever girls, in some ways GPs may be going the same way. Hospital consultants or even just hospital doctors in general are thought of as more prestigious.

The second is medicine is still practiced in a hierarchical way. If you are in pain, most nurses cannot prescribe pain meds from the outset on a typical ward, they have to wait for the doctor (even a junior rubbish one with hardly any training) to appear and get them to sign it off. Same with discharge, same with treatment plans. You are beholden to the doctor, who is beholden to the consultant.

Third, most people in our local hospital that people think are nurses are not nurses. They are health-care assistants, and luckily very good in the wards I've been on (more than seven and counting). The bulk of daily care tasks are undertaken by them, and there's usually many of them and just one nurse who is looking after at least two or three bays at once and does a lot of paperwork. It's a lot about co-ordination and organization of other staff. They still have to wait for the doctor to come around though to sign everything off which must be very frustrating to them when some of the actions (prescribe paracetamol) could be undertaken by a member of the public on their own.

Nurses have high accountability now, and it's stressful and bureaucratic as an occupation.

Anyone who says 'lower class' should be questioned anyway, what a way to refer to people!

Yes but not all and there isn't an homogenous national standard which there needs to be for transparency.

I have mixed views. When I left school in 1978 the clever, middle class girls, who weren't quite med school standard, went to do degree nursing at London uni's attached to significant London Teaching Hospitals. The O'Level girls (probably 4-6) who weren't quite A'Level standard (and uni was not such a thing then), went to do SRN nursing at 17 at the local hospitals.

Similarly, at a London Teaching hospital, where my mother had heart surgery in the spring, the nurses were outstanding. Outstanding does not spring to mind when I reflect on my interactions with A&E and outpatients at my local hospital and my mother's local hospital (district generals). I could think of a few other epithets but won't commit them to writing.

The nurse practitioners oth at the London Minor Injury/UTC near where I work in SW London have been excellent - and dare I say more than a little middle class - usually in their 50s.

In relation to midwifery, I found a London Teaching Hospital very mixed 30 years ago. The young midwives were very posh and very right on and the older ones a very mixed bag indeed, and some of them I would describe as "rough" in every sense of the word. My next baby was born on the Surrey borders and the midwives I deal with were diverse and excellent. The younger ones, fairly posh, were quite arsy and not very helpful - they definitely didn't think their role extended to practical post birth help.

I suspect there are different norms in different hospitals. My local district general hospital is in a very privileged area in Surrey. There is nothing outstanding about the nursing staff, some of whom, especially in A&E appear "as rough as a badger's arse". The slightly bigger hospital in a much more mixed and deprived area a few more miles away is staffed by much more expert, polite and more helpful nurses from a very diverse demographic. Class isn't particularly a factor at either. Behaving in a polite and civilised manner is markedly absent at the "posher" hospital but I suspect there are fewer developmental opportunities there - and it is just outside eligibility for London weighting.

@Decaffeinatedplease I found when in with my dying mum that nurses mainly did the drug rounds.

I think it is an accessible profession for, amongst others, bright, hardworking working class women and a good thing too
Maybe there are other professions that could attract these women but they aren't as visible- everyone knows to some degree what a nurse is and careers advice at school is rubbish, so I can see why lots of girls choose nursing.

I think hisotorically there were routes into nursing (SEN) that were accessible to less academic girls (not boys as they went to factories!), but I think now the equivalent is HCA, a vital role but less responsibility and less qualifications needed

Lots of disingenuous posts here. Any poster who says her dd is thinking of nursing is basically told she needs to aim higher (i.e. medicine). Often said DD is not doing the right A levels for medicine, and might actually want to, you know, nurse.

My DD has just finished her second year of child nursing. When I say this to to anyone, I get a load of sanctimonious twaddle about what a wonderful person she must be to have a vocation. In contrast when people hear my DS is studying medicine, they say wow. The difference in responses to the two degrees is striking.

When I trained (pre-degree), and where I trained to an extent, was full of 'gals from the shires'. Lots of wealth in the family, with opportunities for university and/or travel. But they chose nursing
And believe it or not, both working class and upper class people can be clever/thick, and go into nursing by choice !!
Few nurses are frustrated doctors, and it's insulting to think they are

Every trust has different uniform still ( although meant to be working towards a national uniform) in our trust it’s a navy uniform form bands 6 to 9 ….just different coloured piping….the sen is making a come back as a nursing associate

@Nadeed, I'm sorry about your mum. I agree the nurses do the drug rounds, the HCA's can't do that, but the nurses can't initiate most drug treatments initially, so they are dependent on the doctors to sign off/agree with their suggestions. It can be frustrating. In hospice care they seem to have more autonomy, but they also don't have the same uniforms so I was never sure who was who and they don't have doctors in the hospice all the time as far as I could see.

There were two levels of qualified nurses, registered nurses and enrolled nurses, enrolled nurses only did two years,training compared to three years registered nurse training and from my understanding ( as I only saw the very tail ending of enrolled nurses as they were being phased out when I did my training in the early 90,s ) thy could do some but not all of the tasks of registered nurses and couldn't be responsible for the shift
They seem to have Been brought back though under the nursing associate role.

There are nurse-prescribers, but that's a sub-set (and very useful if you need antibiotics in a Minor Injuries unit!)

No longer the case as a lot of nurses specialise and out earn doctors or enter senior management again earning more than docs
(whose union has been useless until waking up recently. )

Thanks. Unfortunately she was not eligible for a hospice place. She died in a hospital room.