I’ve watched, over more than 35 years, while what was a great job (for staff and patients -which I’ll explain and evidence) was deliberately destroyed. Mental nursing is now a crap job and so is nursing assistant or HCA. The proof of the pudding is in the numbers. There aren’t enough people training AND staying in the job after they’ve experienced how crap and unsafe it is. The government and DOH have actively made this disastrous state of affairs worse.
After the GFC, our genius managers in the DOH, having saved money (like you save money by not replacing the spare tyre – until you have a puncture) by suspending nurse recruitment, kicked the can down the road by recruiting from the PIIGS countries. Those countries couldn’t even afford to pay their own nurses so they came here for work. (They still couldn’t speak English properly but I daresay that got fudged). Nowadays, the can is kicked along further by importing not only African qualifieds but unqualified Africans who come to Britain to train (yes, they are not already trained or experienced as HCAs in their own countries) as HCAs and receive benefits, family re-unions and a track to citizenship. While 9% of Britain’s working age population are on benefits, some on unemployment benefits!
Other stunts have been to invent new nurse-adjacent jobs like nursing associate. IMHO those people could have become perfectly capable qualifieds if it only took a diploma or even a certificate. It’s only the falsified and unnecessary requirement for a degree that prevents them. One day we’ll find out about the backhanders, lobbying and whatever it took to convince the Ministers of Health and Education to sign it off and sell-out union leaders to gush their pants about how wonderful it would be.
There aren’t any more cans to kick down the road from where I’m looking.
Nurses and doctors (*) come into this job to do good, to help people in distress and mend them. Then politicians and managers write laws, policies and punishments to stop them doing so – on pain of disciplinaries. They falsely pretend it’s for safety, for uniformity, consistency, to improve standards. That’s bullshit. These laws and policies achieve none of that, though stats are manipulated to make it look as though they do. Fewer and fewer people will start those jobs and of those who do, many will leave, disillusioned.
*) shorthand, obviously, because there isn’t space to acknowledge everyone, social workers, occupational & physiotherapists, clinical psychologists and lots of unqualified support workers, HCAs, porters and cleaners.
Continues in ‘Crap job’ Pt 2
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