Nursing must be a vocation, not an academic discipline

AN excellent article by Professor Laura Serrant (The Yorkshire

Post, May 12) to coincide with International Nurses Day. What a pity that she emphasised that nursing is a profession when, in reality, it is a vocation. There is a considerable difference. In my opinion, that is what is wrong with our current care services.

Of course, we need welleducated leadership and those with the exceptionally necessary skills to operate some of those modern technical and, dare I say ‘ethical’ decisions which regularly crop up, not only in the political and leadership spheres, but increasingly in our day-today routine caring role.

However, the vast majority of nursing should be performed by people with dedicated understanding of what the patient needs and wants – people whose original and continuing objective is ‘care’.

Unfortunately the General Nursing Council, the Royal College of Nursing and the Department of Health have elected for nursing to be totally academically-oriented. This means that every qualified nurse now needs to have had a university qualification with only short periods of work experience.

Consequently when nurses appear in the workplace newly qualified, they have virtually no ‘hands-on’ experience and are extremely reluctant to accept the basic role of ‘bedside’ caring necessities.

Faced with the spectre of ‘getting one’s hands dirty’, many newly-qualified nurses opt to get out of the service in favour of using their newly acquired qualification as a meal ticket into some other related sphere or sign up to an agency where they can work on a ‘pick and choose’ basis, avoiding difficult roles.

Again in my opinion there two possible answers to the problem:

Every person wishing to attempt to become a registered nurse should spend at least six months on the wards in a supervised bedside role where they could discover what the job entails .

The role of ‘state enrolled nurse’ (SEN) should be reinstated, allowing many people to enter nursing without the necessity of high academic qualifications. This would also not only improve the quality of ‘bedside nursing’ but would also remove the likelihood of leaving routine jobs to untrained assistants.

During the course of 40 years I have interviewed many people wishing to become nurses. The most important questions I asked were: “What is nursing and how do you see yourself in that role?” The answers were enlightening.