NHS Care

Has the NHS lost its way when comes to being the caring service?

Our nurses are indeed some of the highest trained nurses in the world. Our university hospitals have certainly done the job of raising nursing standards, and a British qualified nurse can get a highly paid job anywhere in the world. But have they forgotten to teach our nurses how to care? Has the focus on medical performance moved our nursing service away from the essential nursing care of washing and cleaning patients. Hygiene problems persist throughout the NHS. Can we be confident that our loved ones in hospital will be fed, or assisted to the toilet? Unfortunate today that is increasingly not the case. Do our highly trained younger nurses consider that these jobs are too menial for their highly trained skills.

I would certainly like to hear their views on the matter, and the views of hospital managers on who is responsible for the 'essential' nursing care of looking after patients. Not all patients have loving caring family members willing to come in and do these jobs. Some think it is basic nursing care that will be provided, but cases of malnutrition in our hospitals are rising. Good quality food and consumption of it is 'essential' to good health and recovery from illness. Perhaps we need Jamie Oliver to go and teach NHS managers the basics of healthy eating?

The absence of junior nurses learning basic care skills on our hospital wards has been the price of our superb university hospitals. It has to be asked if the rise of MRSA, now generally falling; and Clostridium Difficile (CDif), now significantly increasing, is down to the establishment of these specialist training hospitals.

But if the fall in MRSA cases is due to cutting patient visitors, who then will provide the basic care? When hospitals first became aware of the growing crisis with CDif the policy was to isolate the patients in dedicated beds. Staff looking after them were banned from the rest of the hospital until four days after working there, but in West Suffolk hospital visitors pass through the rest of the hospital to get there, or to leave. The four day restriction on working elsewhere in the hospital has been so downgraded that at night nurses might be called out to go to treat other patients directly.

Now the letters page of the EADT might not be the best place to highlight these issues, but our Councillors are not usually health experts, and when NHS senior managers report to Council they are full of their successes. We need to hear direct from the frontline, but how can we when nurses who speak out in public face disciplinary measures! The public elect their representatives to act on their behalf and that is what we must do. If we cannot get the information we need through established procedures then we must not shy away from bring the debate to the public forum through the EADT.