We must invest in nursing care

16 Apr 2011
Everybody has been horrified by the report by the Health Service Ombudsman detailing harrowing stories of elderly NHS patients given no help to eat or left in urine-soaked clothes. It has been greeted with pious expressions of concern and well-worn clichés about 'the need to learn lessons'.

However, this is not the first time that poor care of the elderly in the NHS has been exposed and nothing seems to change. People seem reluctant to discuss the possibility that there might be systematic reasons behind it.

For example, the increasing 'professionalisation' of nursing is a good thing, in principle, leading to increased status and respect for the profession.

As we move to an all-graduate profession, there is a danger that kindness, and the willingness to take time out to help a patient finish their dinner, will seem less important than exams.

A generation ago, ward maids and porters might have taken time to help patients in little, intimate ways. These were permanently-employed NHS staff who took pride in their work, before privatisation of hospital cleaning services.

As an MP, I regularly visit care homes and, though they are clean and tidy, the inhabitants often seem to spend all day tethered to a chair, staring at a flickering TV screen. The underpaid, overworked staff are too busy to talk to them and visitors are infrequent.

The artificial distinction between medical care and social care, promoted by successive governments, helps reinforce the notion that feeding, bathing cleaning and just being kind to a patient is not 'real' nursing care.

Sadly, geriatric care is likely to be one of the victims of the combination of thoughtless re-organisation and big cuts in NHS funding.

Though most people working in nursing and social care do a wonderful job, the horror stories cannot be ignored. The job of politicians is to invest in an NHS where that kind of nursing care is valued and can flourish.


back ⇢