Nurses should be nice. Obviously.

13 Apr 2011 Leave a Comment

by littlenursey in Nursey news, Placements Tags: abuse, bad practice, cuts, dispatches, hospital, manchester, NHS, nice nurse, NMGH, north manchester general hospital, nurse, nurses, nursing, student nurse

So on Monday night many of you may have watched the television programme ‘Dispatches’ on Channel 4, which showed footage filmed by an undercover volunteer and porter working in areas of NMGH (North Manchester General Hospital).
When I was told about it last week, I automatically assumed that it would be full of footage of scenarios where the staff were made to look bad by twisting what they were saying and doing. I lost faith in the media a long time ago.

But it turned out to be quite shocking, with much of the footage showing things exactly how they were.
I’m not going to comment on the issue of the claim that the trust are more interested in moving patient’s around as quickly as possible to meet targets, causing the deaths of patients. It’s not my place to say and being a student, I wouldn’t like to risk my career in any way. I will end that part right there by saying that I have no opinion on the matter.
But it was the footage of the small minority of nurses and healthcare assistants (HCA’s) being cruel, unsympathetic and unprofessional to patients that upset me. Much of this happened in front of a student nurse, who I felt very sorry for.
To watch the programme click here.

Nurse Ratched hmmm?

Indeed, the programme showed a very tainted representation of the hospital. I have done most of my training at NMGH, been a patient there several times, have family who work there and I was born there. The vast majority of my experiences there have been very good ones. I have been lucky to encounter the caring, friendly, skilled and professional staff there and I can say that I have enjoyed almost all of my training there.
But no matter how much pressure a nurse is under, how irritated a nurse can get by the bed managers, or how ‘annoying’ a nurse may find a patient – calling them a ‘twat’, speaking to them like children, sitting around with their feet up to talk about their weekend and actually doing all this in front of a student is more than sickening and unprofessional.

Trying to force a patient to eat and saying “Do you want to get in bed? Eat your dinner then!” is possibly one of the cruellest things I can think of doing to a patient aside from physical abuse.
The programme was designed to highlight the pressure the NHS is under due to government cuts, and for some reason they decided to show this with a lot of negative footage of bad practice, but surely – budget cuts and work load pressure are not excuses for this terrible behaviour by nurses!

My point here is – regardless of how terrible or amazing the programme was, if you’re a student nurse, already a nurse or thinking of becoming one - please, for everyone’s sake, be a nice one!
My mother just agreed that even if there were no cuts to the NHS, those nurses would still behave that way. She also added that this is going on in many wards in every hospital in the UK, which of course has to be true.

Today, I was taking the blood pressure of a young patient who was in a bed opposite an older lady with dementia. While I was doing this, the patient said to me,

“Can I just say, it was so nice to see you go over and just be nice to that old lady over there this morning. I know she’s confused all the time, but no one has really had the time for her and I’m glad you were nice to her.”

Although this doesn’t sound like much, patients have said similar things to me  many times now, and it worries me. All I had done was sat with this old lady, spokne to her and patted her on the shoulder as she cried because she missed her nephew. Nurses and HCA’s might not always have time to do this, but when a patient is crying, we should make time, not roll our eyes and walk away.
Comforting a patient is just another example of what I consider as being a nice nurse.
Yes – we need more staff.

I was looking around my cohort at uni yesterday during a lecture, wondering how many of us would turn out like those nasty nurses we saw on the TV. Like I said before, it is only a minority of nurses and HCA’s who behave in this way, and I hope that the public don’t turn against nurses and regard them all as cranks, much like many of the public do with the Police. It is unfair and highly annoying – nurses and Police do not get good press for the huge majority of good work they do.

So I believe the old advice is right; “Treat your patient how you would like your mother to be treated”.

That means not calling them a twat by the way.