Tales from the Gulag or visiting or being a patient in ZaNu Labour’s NHS 004 nursing care

There are more managers, sorry nurses, than ever before looking after patients if you believe the Party.

Nurse bloggers have pointed out how bad care is and they are right re intelligence and common sense being lacking in some of the alleged care professions. Our relative’s surgery means that they cannot use one arm and turning is difficult so reaching for things is hard.

Nonetheless domestics, who now wear scrubs and no ID, so look like the doctors on Scrubs, put things on tables out of reach and walk away. And you wonder why people starve in hospitals?

Mixed sex wards.

New Labour said it would abandon them. Our relative has already had an uninvited male visitor (Cyril) in the middle of the night.

There is always at least one Cyril, or Elsie, on a ward who gets up frequently at night to wonder or go to the loo, or scream out for no apparent reason and then plays musical beds until after waking all the patients near them up, who then shout at Cyril, or Elsie, to go to the right bed, succeed in waking more people up several times a night.

This is while our relative arms were compromised and immobile a frightening experience against a backdrop of being confined in a single room next to the nurses station and hearing loads of verbal abuse towards the nurses and doctors while they, the patient, was defenceless and trying to recover from surgery.

When our relative finally was just able to get to the loo unaided they had another uninvited male visitor in their toilet. Granted the toilet concerned was labelled as “for use by males and females” but if your personal security is compromised and you are only just out of bed you do feel incredibly vulnerable and embarrassed by such Party sponsored intrusions and equalitarianism.

It was one of the Party’s promises 12 years ago to do away with mixed wards but as it costs money and involves effort why bother? They won’t be asking our relative or any other patient why they should bother as they might not get the answer they want.

Sleep was difficult for our relative partly because of the disturbance by nurses for frequent and necessary observations throughout the night but also because they are opposite the nurses’ station on a busy ward taking regular admissions day and night.

Our relative, who is of a nursing background, has commented on the lack of confidentiality and the frequent abuse of the nursing staff by patients. All of this was heard, but not seen, (apart from Cyril) as they lay in bed after several bouts of major surgery. They thought the standard of nursing care had generally gone down but nonetheless when they were sick they did single out a few really good individual nurses.

However they did not get their hair washed for 5 days until a friend, a fellow nurse, came in and did this for them. They bought a hair dryer and hair washing kit. A couple of days earlier the same nurse friend came with another nurse friend and gave our relative a good wash. They were 2 RGNs something that militant medical nurse can only dream of. And they were there for one patient.

On one day a busy ward which was taking acute admissions for orthopaedics, head injuries and elective surgery was short of 3 nurses. On one evening our relative had 2 dedicated nurses not provided by the Party, who is technically responsible for patient care, or the multitude of nurse managers and their clip boards who should have been caring for our relative, but by 2 caring friends and co-workers of our relative.

We have no complaints against the nurses who by and large do try to do their best for the individual patient. Unfortunately it is against a back drop of the NHS ethos of "care on the cheap" and if there is a shortage of staff employ more managers to find out why rather than employ more nurses on the ground.

Praise be to the Party, and its managers and its ministers for caring for our relative so well.

We thank those nurses who were there for their dedication in caring for our relative and their other patients on an understaffed busy ward. They are the unsung heroines (and heroes) who are daily abused for the failings of every nurse manger who never works on a ward.

Patients want and appreciate nurses on the ground – not clipboard carrying invisible nurse managers or modern matrons which is what they are increasingly getting. Hint.