Nurses told: Don’t call women ‘ladies’ and never say ‘alcoholic’

NURSES should avoid referring to old people as ‘pensioners’ and calling women ‘ladies’ to avoid causing unwitting offence, according to a new official guide.

The Royal College of Nursing i s also advising its members against saying a patient ‘suffers from’ an illness, while problem drinkers should be called ‘alcohol misusers’ rather than alcoholics.

Wards are not ‘ manned’ but instead are ‘staffed’, while the word ‘mankind’ has disappeared under the advice included in the RCN’s new style guide, which has just been published on its website.

The 26-page guide advises: ‘It’s really important to use the correct terms to describe people to avoid causing unwitting offence.’ Referring to age, it states: ‘ Do not use pensioner or OAP as a general description. Do not use the elderly. Use elderly people; [or] older people.’

When it comes to disability, it advises: ‘ Use people with disabilities and avoid both “disabled people” and “the disabled”.’

The advice is based on the theory that describing an individual as ‘disabled’ defines them by their disability alone. In contrast, describing them as a ‘person with a disability’ signals this is just one of many attributes.

Likewise, the guide says nurses and RCN s t aff s hould ‘ avoid describing people as “sufferers” or writing that they “suffer from” [a condition]’. For example, instead of saying ‘ Jane is dyslexic’, the proper phrasing would be ‘ Jane has dyslexia’.

Nor do alcoholics exist in the college’s lexicon. Instead, they become ‘alcohol misusers’.

In the minefield of gender, the RCN says ‘use woman or women, not lady or ladies’.

It adds: ‘ Ensure that your language i s gender- neut r a l , for example: chair not chairman or chairperson; humankind not mankind; staffed not manned.’

The last point is a particular issue for the RCN, as nine out of ten nurses are women.

Last week, a study it commissioned claimed nurses’ wages are suppressed because society considered nursing to be ‘women’s work’.

Last night a RCN spokesman insisted the guide was not intended as an instruction manual on how nurses should or should not speak to patients. Rather, as stated on its front page, it was ‘for print, email and all other digital channels’.

He explained that the last version of the RCN guide was published seven years ago and it had needed updating.

The RCN’s s t yl e gui de has echoes of a document issued three years ago by the British Medical Association, which advised its 160,000 members not to call pregnant women ‘expectant mothers’, because it might offend transgender people. It urged the use of ‘pregnant people’ instead.

On transgender issues, the Royal

College’s guide advises to ‘be sensitive to people who are non-binary’ – those who do not identify as their birth sex – ‘ and where possible use their preferred pronoun’. That means referring to a person born male but who identifies as female as ‘she’, and vice versa.

Last night Tory MP Philip Davies said: ‘You would think the Royal College of Nurses would have better things to worry about than coming up with this idiotic, politically correct claptrap.

‘ Its leadership ought to make way for people in the real world rather than in the PC bubble they are clearly in.

‘Just as a clue, they might want to focus on things like standards of patient care.’