80 year old nurses.

[IveGotAnIdea]

I've recently taken early retirement from the NHS after 37 years because I realised that I had given it my all and was burned out and also because I thought it would give a younger person a chance to progress.
Over the years, I have worked with many nurses and AHPs who were in their late 60s and 70s, who had retired and returned to senior roles and quite frankly did bugger all, they would openly joke that they were there for the social side! Turning up with freshly baked goods each day and then wanting to chat about their many exotic holidays or grandchildren for an hour. They invariably proved to be a huge distraction while Rome burned all around. Their sick records were also so much worse than younger staff.
There are currently hundreds of young nurses struggling to get their first job or working as carers while desperately applying for every job going, others leaving to go abroad because of the lack of progression opportunities.
Am I being unreasonable to think that the NHS needs to stop encouraging clinical staff to stay way past their best before dates and maybe even introduce a mandatory cut off age.
If they miss the hospital environment there's always volunteering.

It’s a performance, not an age, issue. Underperforming people of any age should be get rid of.

They aren’t. I know LOTS of band 7s who are still very much patient facing. Including me.

That's awful. I'm so sorry for anyone who was mistreated by a healthcare professional.

I've had mostly very positive experiences with the NHS thankfully.

I'm not sure that we can say that it's only or mainly elderly HCPs that might be sub par professionally though. That wouldn't be fair or accurate.

Newly qualified can’t get jobs because of NHS trusts poor financial positions and lots of overseas recruitment. The fact is that many trusts have current job freezes so if those old ones ( as you label them) all left they still wouldn’t recruit anyone!

Hmm
We have approx 23,000 + nurse vacancies in the UK.
Can you imagine what state we woul d be in if the over 67's all gave up nursing!!!

Not a great post really. For several reasons. I think you’ve generalised a few people who may be underperforming (which honestly happens at any age) and linked it to all people past retirement age as being useless.

As long as somebody is able to carry out their job, isn’t making clinical mistakes that are putting others at risk, there is no basis for pushing them out of a profession.

My GF (he has been retired for quite some time) is 80 and still in good shape both physically and mentally- he is capable of doing electrical work on both my cousins new build homes. People don’t just have a sell by date.

Proper managers, with degrees in management, not overly promoted clinicians, would help.

I profoundly disagree with this. My experience of working with managers who have no clinical experience is that they have absolutely no idea of what happens on the front line. Our "productivity manager" has seemingly no idea that every patient requires a mountain of paperwork which takes clinical time and insists we cram as many as we can everywhere we have a gap in a day. As a result, patient care suffers because we can't keep up with letters, onward referrals and such and end up offloading some of the work back onto GPs who, themselves, struggle with a similar amount of paperwork.
I worked in a private sector before coming to clinical work and have a very good grasp of both management (in the absence of a degree) and clinical work. I don't particularly want to touch management, personally but I also don't want a 25 year old with MBE telling me how to do my clinical work or going through pointless annual exercises where I have to fill in a diary demonstrating how I use my time (again, taking me away from my clinical load and adding to my admin time which I am no longer allowed to have to begin with).

The NHS need to manage the people they employ properly, irrespective of age. The NHS will have capability policies and if you have a grievance against underperforming colleagues then you have a right to complaint to management about it. Don't however make this age-ist otherwise you will not get anywhere with your complaint.

I know lots of hardworking people in 60 and 70s. I also know underperforming younger workers exist. I don't know anyone in their 80s that is still working but perhaps you have exaggerated the number of 80 year old nurses working in NHS and the extent of the problem.