this is terrifying

[2shoes]

terrible

It's awful.

I am afraid my experience of working in a SN Unit only compounds my fear of what will happen to ds3 one day.

I walked from my Nurse training 17 years ago when I had been there 18 months and still not actually nursed anyone...... I see that isn't any better then?

Totally agree with many of comments above. I think there should be a 2 tier nursing system (something in the back of my mind says tehre used to be such a thing?)

I'm sure there are some fantastic carers out there who would struggle with the academic side - so they should be in care-based roles, doing what they are good at, whilst the academicly hot nurses have the roles where they are more involved in monitoring drugs/doing admin/the tricky bits. As you can tell I know nothing about nursing, but I can see that making it a graduate career means you lose a lot of skilled people who can't write reports but can make people better, but would only get shoved into auxiliary floor-scrubbing/tea-making roles.

"I am afraid my experience of working in a SN Unit only compounds my fear of what will happen to ds3 one day."
That is chilling

The NMC want to make Nursing an all Degree profesion by 2014, so you may find wards being staffed by people with brains but no common sense.

Scary thought.

Not surprised really. My FIL probably had his life shortened by treatment in his last illness: the nurses used to dump his food in front of him and go "there you are, William", totally disregarding the fact that he was deaf and blind and did not answer to the name of William.

THen they claimed he refused to eat. He ate all right when the family were there and actually helped him to find the food. [angry}

I think we also have to remember though that as well as qualified nurses, trusts are increasingly relying on employing low paid unqualified care assistants. Without generalising, some of the 'care' assistants I have worked with over the years have been some of the most uncaring, unprofessional people that I have ever met. Poorly trained, badly supervised but most of all uninterested in the job that they do. I found as a relatively young ward sister, that care assistants who were older than me seemed to have a huge issue with being delegated to - many have been in the job for years, have been allowed to stagnate and their standards of care are poor. I do despair but I would always implore people to ask for action from the most senior person on duty. I do despair about nursing and it's sad that I feel like that

Also my experience Sassybeast

It's not the caring profession it was when I started and it seems that all the nurses who REALLY care are leaving

Having read a few articles in the Sunday papers on this subject, dh and I were debating why someone hasn't been prosecuted as a result of these cases?

As a mother, if I did not give my dependent child a drink for 26 days, I would quite rightly be subjected to the full force of the law and sent to prison.

Why is this not the case in our hospitals?