How nursing lost its humanity when it became a ‘profession’
How many schools put nursing at the top of their career advice list? How many bright-eyed and energetic young women would walk over broken glass to get into nursing? Very few, because for all its recent degree status, nursing is far from being the go-to career destination. Yet there was a time – not that long ago – when British women took pride in a role that fitted well with having a family, for which they gained status and were respected.
Such stalwarts no longer exist. Young British women have shunned nursing first as a vocation and now as a career. Over the five weeks I was recently in and out of a geriatric psychiatric ward, helping nurse my mother, I only ever met changing shifts of Filipino, Indian and East European nursing staff. Very kind and family oriented most of them were, too – if you saw them more than once.
The news that more nurses are now leaving than joining the NHS – that this service, which we love so much that no one wants to work in it, is haemorrhaging 33,000 each year – came as little surprise to me. What I witnessed on the ward was not ill will or malignance but a “profession” that had lost its humanity and purpose, and was ruled by a tick box compliance culture. It had created a “remote” environment in which nurses who cared struggled. Process had replaced care, to the latter’s detriment.
When I said I helped nurse my mother, what I meant was that I helped with those tasks that today are deemed beneath nurses’ dignity, pay grade or notice. No, I wasn’t measuring her “fluid intake”, but I was helping her hold her cup to drink. I wasn’t injecting blood thinners or giving her medication, but I was noticing her needs, assisting her to the loo, changing her incontinence pad, and helping this helpless person be more comfortable in bed. That used to be nursing.
The routinised care schedules allocated to care assistants don’t allow for that. Nor do they encourage a patient’s appreciation of nurses’ help.
It was to me that my mother said in a confused state: “You are a good nurse.” I wondered how many nurses have a chance of hearing that said to them today? Remote behind their work station, their “professionalism” has largely removed the joy and reward of nursing from their day.
“I want to be a great nurse and I want to give my patients my best, but I feel that I can’t do that at the moment because we’re just too short-staffed, too busy, there are far too many things for us to be doing,” was one nurse’s summation of this problem. With this fundamental job satisfaction stolen, no wonder they feel unappreciated and demoralised.
It is a tragedy. Nurses like this, who care about caring, are no longer able to nurse as they instinctively understand it.
Their dissatisfaction has more to do with the replacement of a devalued vocation with an unrewarding career path to management than with pay or hours. Who thanks or appreciates pen pushers?
Feminism must take its share of the blame for this. By demoting and deriding women’s traditional caring and nurturing roles, it has sidelined the very qualities that make for good nursing. And by turning a vocation into a so-called profession, it has not only killed its inherent job satisfaction but, ironically, reduced its meaning and status.