General headings. Job satisfaction. Pay, terms and conditions. The presumption of good faith and innocence. Violence, dangerousness and risk. One policy to rule them all.
1. Salary and non-cash benefits. These include sick pay, a worthwhile pension scheme, discounted staff canteens and restaurants for shift workers (not just 9-5 for suits), time off for doctor and hospital appointments, professional development courses, genuine career progression, and conferences (it’s been years since I saw a staff nurse get a conference place). I daresay there’s a post or two coming to expand on these.
2. Being cast as the villains, bullies, abusers and judged by a rigged complaints and professional standards system which doesn’t apply to management, only us grunts on the ground floor. (Evidence coming, gallons of it). What’s the alternative? (*i) How do management and government reverse this.
3. Being cast as the villains, bullies & abusers by our courageous mainstream media, not to mention former patients – which includes PDs and scrotes. You will never guess what the MSM do with positive and supportive accounts from former patients.
4. Harmful, unjust, punitive over-regulation that is woke, ‘progressive’ (*ii) rigged and weaponised for management to ‘get’ their enemies. (Plenty more posts coming on this)
Trade unions have declared for the ‘Woke’ side, which coincidentally just so happens to be the winning side (for now). And it’s the side that allows them to pretend they are more virtuous and righteous than you and I. That means they have written policies which allow them to refuse to represent their paying members.
*ii) Good examples provided of the Darlington nurses vs the Darlington Trust managers, Sandie Peggie and Jennifer Melle vs the NMC and RCN, the Darlington nurses vs Unison.
Segueing briefly onto a separate thread, these are good examples of what happens when an organisation gets artificially packed with women, women appointed and promoted precisely because they are obedient and malleable, women who are rewarded for that obedience and for parroting policy.
None of these sellout frauds actually believe in anything. They certainly don’t champion the values and principles that nursing as a profession used to have, back when you could be proud of being a nurse.
Unions should not be yet another tool of government control, they are supposed to be a defence against it. They used to be a threat, a powerful counter-force against management power, even government power.
Years ago, I remember how my NHS trust emasculated and clipped the claws of what had been a powerful union. When it had been powerful, some of the stewards were scary men, high in disagreeability, probably ASPD or adjacent to it. The managers must have hated having to go up against them. When those men retired, the management targeted a, let’s say, less effectual steward, made him a full time employee (previously, stewards were full-time nurses or N/As working the wards and got time off to represent staff in disciplinaries and for other union duties) put them in a cosy office, nowhere near the coal face and waited until his resolve waned. Success.
Proper union representation and protection against all-powerful management is essential to attract and retain enough future mental nurses.
I can tell readers what that degree of union representation looks like, because I remember receiving it as a member and giving it as a rep. I feel a few posts coming on.
Continues in ‘How it’s become a crap job’ Pt 3
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