Thanks for leaving your comment. I wasn’t aware of your blog but I’ll certainly be making reference to it at my place.

I love the straightforward focus on your blog on a) the Daily Mail, Spectator etc know fuck all b) what counts is staff ratios, and they are wrong.

With ref to your comment at my place, I’d love to have more details on what you’ve sent to Iain Dale as a corrective, and what he’s ignored, as I think he really does need challenging and I’d be happy to help with that. He’s probably a more accessible target than, say Melanie Phillips or the Daily Mail (that’s not saying he’s worse), and it would be good to see if we could, with a bit of concerted blog coverage, get some support for a look at the realities of ward-based nursing.

I’ll carry on my history of the changes to nursing from a class/gender perspective as I get chance, and would value your comments.

Thanks for this.

My point was not whether I think the expansion of nursing degrees is a good idea; it was the narrower one that Iain Dale couldn’t be bothered to look up basic facts about the extent to which they already exist and why (Project2000).

On the broader point, though, I actually agree with a good deal of what you say, and while it wasn’t the main focus of my article I as careful to point out that I had reservations, not least in respect of HCA terms and conditions.

I don’t think it’s the move to degree status in itself that is the cause of the problems you rightly identify, though that gets tangled up in it. I agree that the RCN has for ever wanted to ‘professionalise itself’ away from the nitty gritty of what we trained to do as nurses, and the way the degrees developed was far too closely modelled on the early degrees (Kings College, London and one or two other places) which were very clearly the preserve of a nursing elite of largely ruling class stock (I know this from experience as I worked with many as a student at a big south London teaching hospital in the 80s).

In fact the whole story of ‘nursing standards’ is irrevocably tied to class (and obviously gender)and probably deserves a longer analyis than I can do right now, touching on how the nursing elite after the war was drawn from the ruling class happy on the one hand to pander to a medical profession keen to keep its own power base in the new NHS and on the other to keep its workforce under control.

The development of degree nursing, and the subsequent development of a new exploitable workforce in the shape of HCAs (the new ENs, but without the pay or the staffing ratios) was a classic divide and rule managerialist tactic. I think it’s instructive to see what’s happened to nursing (as a broad care job, including HCAs) and compare it to the development of physiotherapy and occupational therapy, for example, where there’s been a real professional solidarity developed in the same way as in teaching through decent unionism/staff group work.

I may well tidy oup my thoughts on this into a full post as I think it’s a fascinating area of cross cutting issues of power and class, which I’ve not really considered for a while (though coincidentlly i was commenting on the early days of the NHS on another post a few days ago).