Here’s a novel idea. Mightn’t Britain improve mental nurse recruitment and retention by improving nurse training courses?
Start by asking ‘what do you suppose should be the purpose of mental nurse training?’ You’ll see this is craftily related to other posts and series like ‘What is the purpose of a mental nurse’ and ‘… a mental hospital?’
You see, the problem is the purpose of all current nurse training is not what it should be. You won’t see this stated honestly anywhere, but here are some of the true goals.
1. To recruit a high percentage of BME’s, women and homosexuals to meet targets.
2. To attract studious (= high in agreeability, medium to high in neuroticism e.g. more malleable, obedient, tractable) young women onto degree courses and thereby exclude men generally and in particular, working class men and women…
2a) …and to teach them that modern nursing is all about uniformly following policies and procedures (written by their betters), not to question that,
that patient safety is achieved by completing forms,
that acutely and chronically ill patients can be perfectly safely managed and treated simply by being nice and most importantly,
that anyone who doesn’t agree is a bad person and must be reported and if possible, cancelled.
2b) To teach them that Safeguarding is fair and open and protects patients and is definitely not a crock of pig dung. So they can be confident that when reporting a colleague anonymously to the Star Chamber she isn’t the equivalent of a bitter and twisted Stasi informant grassing up their boss to steal their job, oh no, she is a heroic and noble comrade who has just rubber-stamped her place in heaven.
2c) That protecting patients from things they don’t like is an ethical and effective road to their recovery.
3. To offer those nice young women a fast track career progression away from patients, away from the wards, and into family-and-social-life-friendly 9-5 management jobs to game the job turnover stats.
4. To trick as many bums onto seats as possible to maximise university (Polytechnic, really) funding and student loan take-up. How is this different from corrupted US banking and finance salespeople tricking low class, low educated, even unemployed people into taking out Sub-prime mortgages? These parasites do not care a fig whether nursing students complete their courses or stay in their jobs afterwards.
5. To dumb down the ‘degree’ course so it’s easier but keep the name ‘degree’ and of course, the price.
6. To mandate the students being wrapped up in cotton-wool while they’re on placement so they don’t learn by the school of hard knocks. That’ll stop them dropping out and protect the Uni from all those safeguarding headaches. By the time they qualify and find that nobody’s going to baby them anymore it’s someone else’s problem.
NB to follow this idea properly, you need to know that before Project 2000, nurse training was not provided by further or higher education. Back then, nurse training was a) an NHS job and b) taught by tutors (also NHS employees) at a School of Nursing usually attached to a hospital or group of hospitals.
A. It was a job, you were employed as a student nurse with a (low) salary. You spent 12 weeks at a placement, mostly wards but a few community teams, adult day centres, ESN schools etc followed by a week or two in school for study block. You did the work of a nursing assistant but as you got your stripes, you’d give out tablets and learn what the qualifieds did. At the end, on management placement, you’d take charge – maybe with an RMN looking over your shoulder.
B. School of Nursing. There were hundreds of these. Some, based in large hospitals, taught more than one specialty. There were 4 back then. (*) RGN. RSCN. RMN. RNMH. And two levels, Registered and Enrolled. I can’t find out who marked and validated our state finals but I guess it was the UKCC or ENB. The qualification was a certificate (not sure about E/Ns) which belonged to further education, its about an NVQ L4. That is an indicator it was more practice than theoretically based.
Keep an eye on the School of Nursing idea, it will come in handy later. But next, let’s look at what the point of nurse training should be.
*) Registered General Nurse. Registered Sick Children’s Nurse. Registered Mental Nurse. Registered Mental Handicap Nurse.
Midwives, Health Visitors, School Nurses and others had to qualify first, then take a second qualification.
Leave a Reply