southgate withdraws donation to nurses

[whiskeyandbeer]

anyone see this?
middlesborough manager gareth southgate withdrew money that had been pledged on behalf of his club to the nurses mayday appeal over the tactics they used.
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/football/premier_league/article2638251.ece

personally i completely agree with him.the meythods used by the group were disgraceful and they just saw footballers as an easy target to hold to ransom with the threat of public shaming.

I also agree with him. The charity used awful tactics.

agree totally. although tbh I never agreed with the concept in the first place. Yes nursing is a thankless task and many of them don't get paid that much, but people who go into nursing do so fully aware of what it involves.

Nurses are paid a salary - nursing is not a charity.

I find it also a bit patronising towards nurses.

Nurses should be paid more by the NHS, not by charities.

Agree with him and everyone here, nurses are not a charity, they don't get paid much but there are a lot of people who get paid less and a lot of starving people who need the charity much more.

Patronising as well. I have spoken to a few nurses about it and they were all highly embarassed by this campaign.

but isn't the charity a nurses' benevolent fund? it's not about increasing their pay (because not all nurses will see any money), but about having a fund for particular difficulties that nurses might have (eg long term illness etc).

I don't really think the campaign was all that bad. In my opinion it wasn't so much about publically shaming the footballers, as publically drawing attention to the enormous and immoral disparity between footballers' and nurses' wages. which it did very well.

blackmail into giving to charity is totally wrong. people should give because they beleive in a cause ,not because they have been shamed into it. maybe directing their energy into shaming the governemnt to increase nurses' salaries would have been more beneficial.

they have sadly shot themselves in the foot.

still a bit arsey to withdraw the donation once it is pledged though.

but can understand why someone would be put off from donating

lulumama - the campaign was about shaming the government, with some footballers shamed along the way. why "should" giving to charity be done entirely without ulterior motives (eg blackmail or desire to look good)? It isn't usually completely altruistic.

no, maybe so, but people don;t like to feel railroaded into doing any thing, even if it is a good deed.

we give to charity to help make positive changes, and feeling good about that is a nice side effect.

but bullying ill behoves anyone, even a charitable organisation.

Oh charitable organisations are always bullying people, nothing new about that.

But as I understand it, the charity were drawing attention to the footballers who had already publicly pledged to pay into the nurse's benevolent fund. Reaping all the PR rewards of that. And the PR rewards are very high - interviews, chat show appearences, after dinner speeches, all those extra media-career-building things which they'll need to keep ludicrously rich when they've stopped kicking a ball about. (Because retiring with an income the size of a small developing country's GDP isn't quite enough.) Their pledge to the nurse's charity helps build that career. And they don't pay out? Disgusting. If that's the way it happened (and I haven't followed it that closely, perhaps it isn't) then I think the charity were quite right to out them. If you're going to use charidee as a means of making yourself look good to the public, then FGS at least hand over the goods. The whole thing of public charity giving with all these celebs patting each other on the back and saying how marvellously generous they all are, is thoroughly nauseating anyway, but if you're going to do that self-congratulatory stuff, put your money where your mouth is.

Oops, sorry, that turned into a bit of a rant.

Completely agree, LB, couldn't have put it better myself.

little bella
it was what i was thinking too!

i would never pledge cash to anyone and NOT do it..tis premiershabby behaviour,
red cards and faces all round

miserableborough!

If they wanted to help Registered Nurses out they should campaign for safe nurse/patient ratios in hospitals.

They could shame the NHS management into hiring more nurses instead of flat out refusing to have any staff on the wards. This would also benefit the patients by reducing their risk of complications, infection, and death. Research has shown that the reduction in these negative outcomes would save more money in the long run for the NHS and the taxpayer.

They are pissing in the wind with this "nurses need to be paid more" stuff. Yes we should be paid more. We work harder and have more responsibility than most other uni grads. But that big pay rise is never going to happen and if it did, they would increase our patient to nurse ratios by so much people would stop coming into work due to raw fear. No amount of money could get me into work if I am at risk of criminal charges because I have too many patients.

militantmedicalnurse.blogspot.com/2007/09/my-am-i-so-angry.html

and

militantmedicalnurse.blogspot.com/2007/09/why-are-nurses-getting-away-from.html

I remember when this first came up on MN and I'm pretty sure I was against it then.

So, I don't blame him.

im a nurse and i dont agree with the campaign

another point is, i trained to be a nurse knowing what i was gettting in to - pay, conditions etc, no one had a gun to my head...

i have to say withdrawing a pledge is pretty poor - as a fundraiser, I use pledges to try to forecast our income streams for the year, what we need to pay for and how much we need to fundraise for

if he didn't believe in the cause then he shouldn't have pledged

FWIW, the way the appeal was run was very poor and naming and shaming is avoided by charities for this reason
this sort of thing can damage charities in general
we rely on public confidence
if people think we don't do things well, then they won't donate