Though Cowards Flinch

Just a quickie, but I have to.

Unlike Iain Dale, I am a trained nurse (registration now lapsed).  I trained at St George’s Hospital in Tooting in the 1980s, and worked in London, Switzerland, Bangladesh and (briefly) Lancashire, before moving on to the rest of my life.

I only raise this to establish some basic credibility, in order to then offier a corrective to Dale’s peddling of inaccurate crap on his website this morning.  He says:

‘So when I heard this morning that the NHS was now going to insist on a degree before nurses could train, I was dumbfounded.’

Yes, almost unbelievably, he thinks the new proposals mean that all trainee nurses will have to have a degree in something else before they start training to be a nurse.  It’s degrees IN nursing, we’re talking about, you ignorant, silly person [update: he’s now realised that bit and updated his own post.

Further, he has clearly never heard of Project2000, an initiative which started seven or eight years  before the year 2000, with a view to moving nurse education into higher education by about 2000. 

So when I say Dale’s a decade out of date, I’m being charitable.  His understanding of what modern nursing is really about is probably about fifty years out of date.

He says he was a nurse when he was in his gap year.  He might have been called an auxiliary nurse then, but now he’d almost certainly be called a Health Care Assistant (HCA) instead.  The details about how HCAs relate to nursing (and how being an HCA can lead into nurse training), are not very hard to find.

The training and career path of nursing has changed, and in many ways the HCAs now do what Enrolled Nurses did a quarter of a century ago. 

For Dale therefore to make out that the steps now proposed, which are to move the process towards the finalisation of a workforce strategy begun in the early 1990s under a Tory administration, are some kind of ridiculous overnight shift in policy thought up by Labour just for a laugh - a notion picked up eagerly by his trolls – is misleading at best, and damaging to the reputation of nursing profession at worst.  

Nursing as a profession gets enough shite from people eager to hark back to a Carry On world of  stern matrons, randy doctors and promiscuous ‘young things’, without Dale sticking his fact-free oar in.

He should be supporting the ‘modernisation’ of a workforce, not throwing around aspersions about what it does and doesn’t take to be a highly trained public servant.

I think there are issues with Project 2000 and what ensued, not least in relation to the terms and conditions of HCAs, but at least I know some of the facts, and how to use Google just to check them.