Nurses are told: Don’t call women ladies and don’t 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 is 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 are ‘staffed’, while the word ‘mankind’ has disappeared under the advice included in the RCN’s new style guide, 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”.’

Likewise, the guide says nurses and RCN staff should ‘avoid describing people as “sufferers”’ or writing that they ‘suffer from’ a certain condition. For example, instead of saying ‘Jane is dyslexic’, the proper phrasing should be ‘Jane has dyslexia’.

In the minefield of gender, the RCN says ‘use woman or women, not lady or ladies’. It adds: ‘Ensure that your language is gender-neutral, 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 it was ‘for print, email and other digital channels’.

The RCN’s style guide 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.

Tory MP Philip Davies said: ‘You would think the RCN 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. They might want to focus on things like standards of patient care.’