We need to meet demands of the future
For: Peter Carter
Nursing is a profession for which demand is only going to increase. With an ageing population and more people suffering from long-term conditions, caring for patients is set to become as important to the health service as technological advances. With 200,000 nurses due to retire within the next ten years and the threat of cuts hitting frontline staff, something needs to change in how we bring people into the profession.
Nursing is an activity of the head, the heart and the hands. However, the fundamentals of patient care will remain the same when the profession moves to all-graduate entry. What will improve is that all future nurses will be given an education that will equip them to meet the demands of the future.
This move is not about elevating the status of nurses, but about ensuring that there are enough nurses with the right skills to meet the demands of an increasingly complex health service.
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Far from restricting entry to the nursing profession, we must ensure that the door continues to be as wide open as possible. Nursing cannot become a career only for people who have taken the traditional academic route, and the past experiences of nursing students who have often had previous careers will remain enormously valuable. More support should also be given to ensure that nobody drops out owing to financial or other pressures.
Patients should feel confident that the nurse of the future will be able to use their additional skills and experience to provide expert clinical care, to help patients to make the right choices and to deliver the fundamentals. Above all, we need a nurse education system which encourages the best entrants to pursue a career in care.
Dr Peter Carter, a former mental health nurse, is chief executive and general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing
They write about care rather than give it
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Against: Katherine Murphy
The NHS must have good basic nursing at the heart of its care. If it does not, then all the high- tech care in the world is pointless. Worse, it costs us all more, because the basics of nursing care are dignity, compassion and, above all, safety. In their absence the costs of care soar because of infection rates, overblown bureaucracy to deal with complaints and endless form-filling at the nurses’ station.
Our recent report, Patients not Numbers, People not Statistics, described heart- rending cases of inadequate patient care. It showed what happens when nurses focus on the wrong things and neglect fundamentals such as helping patients with feeding, bathing and using the toilet, or assisting those recovering from an operation to get back, quite literally, on their feet.
Patients and their families contacted us in their hundreds. They were angry that their final memories were of a loved one enduring appalling neglect.
Since the introduction of Project 2000, which shifted training from the bedside to the classroom, nurses have lifted their eyes to the personal prizes of nurse specialisms and been allowed to ignore the needs of their sick, vulnerable and often elderly patients.
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Some no longer want to provide those basics. They are trained to be a graduate nurse and swallowed up by a bureaucratic system that does not recognise the care that patients should be receiving. Nothing about nurse training tells them they have got it wrong. How can you begin to teach people how to treat patients with dignity and compassion in an academic setting?
A degree has sent out all the wrong messages, as it has become more important to write about care than to give it. These new proposals make the situation worse. Yet a combined diploma and degree system leaves room to move up the hierarchy and enjoy career progress.
Katherine Murphy is a former nurse and director of the Patients Association