A Crisis in Nursing

8/2/2019 A Crisis in Nursing

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A crisis in nursing: Six operations, six stayin hospital and six first-hand experienceof the care that doesn't care enough

Special Report, Day one: NH

organisation is at the top of thpolitical agenda. But what about th

vital basics that more and morpatients say are being neglected?

Christina Patterson
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/christina-patterson/a-crisis-in-nursing-six-operations-six-stays-in-hospital--and-six-firsthand-experiences-of-the-care-that-doesnt-care-enough-7628092.html


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Tuesday, 10 April 2012

Just over a year ago, at the RSA,

gave a talk. When I got to the lecterand took a sip of water, I could se

that my hand was shaking. I'm usuall

a bit nervous when I give a talk, bu

I'm not usually so nervous that I ca

hardly swallow. I was nervous becausthe talk was supposed to sounspontaneous enough to work as a liv

event, but polished enough to work o

the radio. But most of all, I wanervous because of what I was abou

to say.

I had, I told the audience, recently haan operation. It was, I said, my sixth i

the past eight years. The surgeon, said, was lovely, and so was th

anaesthetist, and so were the nurses


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But I was surprised that the nursewere lovely, because what I'd learnt

during my six stays in hospital, wa

that surgeons were often lovely and swere anaesthetists, but nurses ofteweren't kind. The first operation, I tol

them, was on the day we bombed Iraq

I had just been told I had cancer an

was still in shock. I was worried, I saidabout losing a chunk of my breas

worried that I might get lymphedem

from losing my lymph nodes an

worried that the cancer might havspread. But I wasn't, I said, worrieabout the nursing. It had neve

occurred to me, I said, that the thin

you should worry about when you wennto hospital was the nursing.

And then I told them about how, wheI woke up from the operation, and wa


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still in pain and still had tubes going iand out of me, I was told by a nurs

that I had to get my own breakfast.

could, I said, work out how to clip thdrips and drains on to a kind of trollething and use it to propel myself to th

room with the table and the toast. Bu

I couldn't work out how, when you'

just lost the lymph nodes under onarm and had drips going into the othe

one, you were meant to pick up an

pour a giant tea pot. And that,

explained, was when I realised thanobody seemed to care whether I got

cup of tea or not.

It was useful, I explained, to learn tha

the nurses didn't seem to think thing

ike food and drink had anything to d

with them. And to learn that it wasn't good idea to press your buzzer. I


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meant that when I had the next twoperations, I knew the important thin

was to keep quiet and not to make

fuss.

When I told the audience about th

fourth operation, which I had two year

ago, I thought my voice was going t

crack. It made my heart beat faster tthink about it then, and it still makemy heart beat faster now. I wa

worried about losing a breast an

worried that the chunk of flesh anblood vessels from my stomach tha

were going to replace it might, as th

surgeon had warned me, go black andie. I was worried about having a

eight-hour operation and worried tha

my cancer had come back. But I wasn

worried about the nursing. I haswitched to this hospital because I'


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been told that everything tha

happened in it was good.

It took just a few hours for me trealise that it wasn't. It took the nurse

n fact, who told me, when I finall

pressed my buzzer after waiting two

and-a-half hours for someone to chec

the blood vessels I'd been told had tbe checked every 15 minutes, that shwas "busy". And who, when she finall

came back to me, an hour later, didn

seem to notice I was lying in a pool oblood. And who asked me, when

winced, what was wrong with m

stomach. Who didn't, in fact, eve

know what operation I'd had.

In that elegant room, in that RoberAdam house, I tried to explain what

feels like to be lying in a hospital bed i


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so much pain you can't even reach oufor water, and feel that if you pres

your buzzer, you're going to mak

someone cross. I tried to explain what feels like to hear the groans opeople around you whose calls for hel

aren't being answered. And what

feels like to hear nurses who aren

even trying to whisper complaininabout the other patients, and you.

had, I said, and was embarrassed t

say this in front of an audience, an

embarrassed to talk about losing breast, never felt so abandoned, oalone. And I said that I thought it wa

time for nurses to start recognisin

that they have a choice about whetheto do their job badly, or well.

I was on holiday when the talk wenout on Radio 4, as part of a serie


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called Four Thought. I thought sompeople might get in touch, becaus

when you write about anything to d

with health and hospitals, which arthings that affect everyone, peoplalways get in touch. When I wrote

column last February, after a repor

was released about the care of ol

people, and said that it was unfair tsay that nurses were ageist, sinc

some of them seemed quite good a

treating young people badly, too, I go

a huge number of emails. Even so, was surprised. When my talk warepeated, in the PM slot during the NU

strike last July, I got even more.

And what nearly all the people wh

wrote the emails said was that they'

had terrible experiences of nursingtoo. Julie (I can't, for legal reasons


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supplysurnames) said that she habeen "on the receiving end o

degrading treatment", which had le

her "with a permanent dread of evehaving need to enter hospital again"Keith said that he "was shocked by th

attitude of the nursing staff" and sti

"shudders" when he drives by th

hospital. Jo said that my experience"mirrored" hers as "an expectan

mother, a daughter of a very sic

mother, a patient having emergenc

surgery and a mother of a daughtewho had an accident". Sue said thashe was "berated by the night nurse

for ringing her bell and "sobbed for 1

minutes with the relief of leaving thward".

Diana watched her father "fighting fobreath" and "thrashing around i


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blood-stained sheets" while five or sinurses "laughed and joked about the

recent holidays". Caroline was told b

the midwife who was meant to bhelping her through labour that shwas busy "eating her biscuits". Lesle

woke up from her operation for breas

cancer and was given a drin

"reluctantly", by a nurse who wouldnstop reading her magazine. Bronwen

who had open heart surgery, said tha

there were plenty of nurses "hangin

around chatting, sometimes on mobilphones", but not many who seemed twant to do "their job". Denis "woke u

n something akin to correctiv

treatment camp" where he saw "elderlconfused people being threatened iquiet corners" and patients "bein

verbally abused". Ruth found th

nurses looking after her elderly parent


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"disinterested, unapproachable ancross". Emily, whose husband was i

ntensive care for two weeks, said tha

the nurses seemed to have "timenough to grumble and chat", bu"were too pressed to answer a patient'

call".

There were a lot of emails from retirenurses. Jennifer, who spent thremonths in hospital after a car crash

was "shocked by the attitude of th

nurses" and "left with a sense ogrieving" about her profession. Maggi

said she felt "angry" and "ashamed"

Sheila "despaired" of the "presensituation in nursing". Margaret sai

that she, and many of her peers, wer

ashamed to admit they were nurse

because of "the reputation of too manunkind, selfish, disinterested an


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The stories in the emails are very mucike the stories that seem to come ou

almost every week in the press.

teacher who spent nine "nightmardays" at her local hospital told thLondon Evening Standard that sh

"could never recommend" that anyon

should go there, "even if someone wa

dying". She was, she said, "neglected""threatened", and "abused".

businesswoman spent 1,000 hirin

undercover carers to look after he

mother at hers because she believepatients who didn't have "a friend orelative to come in and help look after

had "no chance". A midwife overhear

a colleague telling a woman in labouto "hurry up, or I will cut you".

These experiences may not be thnorm. Newspapers tend not to fill the


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pages with stories of things that wenwell. And the people who respond to

newspaper column, or radi

programme, talking about baexperiences of nursing are likely to bthe ones who've had bad experience

of their own. But the emails, and th

stories in the press, and the stories o

people I've spoken to, and the reportnto the care of the elderly which seem

to suggest that the best thing to d

when you hit 65 is invest in a noose

have convinced me that there is problem with nursing in this countryand that that problem isn't going to g

away.

While I lay in that hospital bed

istening to the cries of pain, an


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thinking of the First World War poetsand not thinking that that wa

ridiculous, I made a vow. I promise

that I would try to make sure thaother people would have a better timn hospital than me. When I got out o

hospital, and cried with relief, I wante

to forget it. But when I heard th

reports of old people lying in thefaeces, or with open wounds that n

one had put a bandage on, or with

mouth that was red and raw an

parched, because they couldn't reacthe beaker of water on their bedsid

cabinet, I knew I couldn't.

I've spent quite a lot of the past yea

trying to find out more about nursing

and thinking about what's gone wron

and how it can be put right. I've beepleased to hear that my Four Though


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programme is being used as a teachintool in quite a few universities an

healthcare trusts, and pleased to hea

from the MP Margot James that shquoted it in a debate in the House oCommons. The talk was a plea fo

kindness and I will always thin

kindness matters. But I'm also awar

that problems that have come aboufor complicated reasons don't hav

simple answers.

As a columnist, I try to solve thproblems of the world in 1,000 word

twice a week. Nobody's going to solv

the crisis in nursing in 1,000 wordsBut over the next four days, I'm goin

to try to draw together the threads o

what have felt to me like quite a

exhausting number of meetingsconversations and reports. I've talke


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A Crisis in Nursing