In response to the ‘Patients not Numbers’ report from the Patient’s Association, I have heard a number of pundits call for the heads of the “Cruel Nurses” who allowed the chronicled events to happen.
In reality, care in the NHS is delivered by a multitude of professional and non-professional groups, not just Doctors and Nurses. There are Social Workers, Physiotherapists and Occupational Therapists, whose responsibilities are the rehabilitation of patients and their safe discharge out of hospital. There are Domestics and Health Care Assistants, who clean the wards, dish-out the food and assist their Nursing colleagues with basic care, freeing them to deal with the mountains of paperwork which must be completed on a day-to-day basis.
Many of the failings in the report will not have been the direct failure of the Nurses on the wards, but of one or other of these related groups. However, where patients are concerned, anyone in uniform on a ward must be, by definition, a Nurse; hence, the failings of any group reflect badly on the Nursing profession.
Because modern NHS care delivery depends on multidisciplinary teams, the blame for sub-standard care rests with all members of that team, not just those of a Nursing persuasion. By making Nurses the scapegoats for wider failings, we are simply sweeping the real problem under the carpet; the NHS needs to abandon the competitive market reforms of the last decade and start working once again as a coherent team, focussed on the delivery of quality, safe care to patients.
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