Nurses have no time for compassion

On the one hand the idea that all nurses are compassionate creatures was never true. I say that as someone with 20 plus years experience working in the NHS and more recently as a patient.

That’s not to say some, maybe most, nurses aren’t. I particularly remember one who held my hand throughout an uncomfortable 2-hour eye operation carried out under local anaesthetic and another who rubbed my back during an endoscopy examination.

But according to a recent study of professional values there is “a moral vacuum at the heart of nursing”.

Nurses are so ground down that they end up as “robots going through the motions” with a focus on clinical skills driving compassion from the job“. Yet compassion is part of the UK’s Nursing Vision.

Eight out of ten say their work conflicts with their personal values much of the time. The study concluded that it was that moral disengagement that leads to patients being put at risk.

Kristen Kristjansson, the psychologist from the University of Birmingham who led the study, said that the state of nursing was far more depressing than any other profession he had studied including lawyers, teachers, and doctors.

He added “When you have been working for five years or more you usually realise that following the rules is not the only important thing. You have to rely on your moral compass” But the nurses didn’t.

In the study of 700 nurses almost half of them sad they acted the way they did because it was what the rules decreed rather than because it was the right thing to do.

The only standard was what was laid down in the codes. Unlike other professions they did;t seem to pick up on their own values as they got more experienced.

This is bad news for patients who can tell when someone is going through the motions. The nurses say they don’t have time to show care and compassion and often come away from patients feeling they could have done more.

Professor Kristjansson worries that this “Mr Spock” mentality means they could struggle in a morally stressful situation such as happened at Mid Staffs where few nurses felt able to speak out about patient neglect.

He thought it was positive that nurses were now seen as a professionals requiring degree-level skills rather than just as assistants to doctors but felt the pendulum had swung too much the other way, away from the ethical core of nursing. Nurses since Florence Nightingale had done more than administer medicines – they created an ethos in hospitals to put patients at ease.

Sir Robert Francis QC, who chaired the public inquiry into the Mid Staffs scandal, backed up the Professor’s calls for more emphasis on virtue and character in nurses’ training.

“A commonly accepted set of values has to be the foundation of professional practice to enable those with this vocation to navigate the ethical dilemmas they face daily”.

Janet Davies, chief executive of the Royal College of Nursing, said the report “demonstrates the emotional pressure on caring professions who, when faced with an inability to work as they know they should, become compromised”.

It’s almost five years since they decided to overhaul the training of health care assistants and introduced compassion as on of the 6Cs of nursing care (see post). Other research has shown compassion is a key characteristic of the best carers and there are questions about whether or not a degree  is really necessary?

It seems like we continually re-invent the wheel as far as nursing is concerned

The way things are going we will have fewer whistleblowers (not that the NHS has a good reputation for the way they treat such people) and the only way to wake people up will be another crisis.

NHS: Trusts you can’t trust to keep you alive

Prior to the publication of the Keogh report it was known that there were 14 NHS Trusts under review out of a total of 160 acute trusts in England.

Now we know there are eleven which have been put into special measures ie they are being run by specialist teams of doctors and nurses parachuted in to sort things out.

The 11 trusts now in special measures are:

1. North Cumbria University Hospitals NHS Trust,
2. Northern Lincolnshire and Goole Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust,
3. Tameside Hospital NHS Foundation Trust,
4. United Lincolnshire Hospitals NHS Trust,
5. Basildon and Thurrock University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust,
6. Burton Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust,
7. East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust,
8. George Eliot Hospital NHS Trust,
9. Sherwood Forest Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust,
10. Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust,
11. Medway NHS Foundation Trust.

 

The other three investigated were: Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, The Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust and Colchester Hospital University NHS Foundation Trust.

Between them the trusts run 19 acute hospitals (16 among those trusts on special measures).

NHS Trusts under investigation

You’ve heard about the Mid Staffordshire hospital scandal where many patients died unnecessarily.

You might also have heard that there are 14 Trusts currently being investigated for poor standards.

They are:

1. Basildon & Thurrock
2. United Lincolnshire
3. Blackpool, Lancashire
4. The Dudley Group, West Midlands
5. George Eliot, Warwickshire
6. Northern Lincolnshire & Goole
7. Tameside, Greater Manchester
8. Sherwood Forest, Nottingham
9. Colchester, Essex
10. Medway, Kent
11. Burton, Staffordshire
12. North Cumbria
13. East Lancashire
14. Buckinghamshire Healthcare

Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, has said poor care in the NHS is unacceptable which is why the review into long-standing problems was carried out.

Sir David Nicholson meanwhile is being allowed to retire with pension intact without taking any responsibility for any of this and specifically the Mid Staffordshire tragedy. No sense of shame or conscience and being rewarded for failure.

NHS Déjà vu

The good news is that plans have been put forward to ensure that all 1.3 million healthcare assistants will have to pass a basic skills test, a “certificate of fundamental care”,  before they can care for patients.

A review by Times journalist Camilla Cavendish following the Mid Staffordshire hospital scandal found that healthcare assistants spend more hands-on time with patients than nurses.

Her plan says that healthcare assistants should be called nursing assistants and be trained alongside nurses with mechanisms for getting rid of poor performers. They would also have a career path to allow the best of them to qualify as nurses without having a degree.

The Health secretary has ruled out full regulation so they wouldn’t be able to be struck off and the Royal College of Nursing supports some of the proposals.

Back in the 1960s there were two groups of general nurses. Student nurses who trained for three years and qualified to became State Registered Nurses (SRNs)and Pupil nurses who trained for two years to became State Enrolled Nurses.

In my local hospital you could easily tell who was who by the colour of their uniforms. Student nurses wore green and when they became SRNs they had a mid-blue uniform with a fancy belt and buckle (Sisters and more senior nurses wore dark blue). Pupil nurses wore purple and when they became SENs they wore brown uniforms. There were also cadet nurses aged under 17 who weren’t allowed on the wards who wore a pink or lilac gingham pattern uniform. Different hospitals had different colour schemes although mid-blue for SRN and dark blues for senior nurses was common. Nurse tutors sometimes wore maroon. You get the picture.

Then in the early 1990s it was decided that SENs should follow a conversion course to become an SRN as all nurses – SENs and State Registered Nurses (SRNs) – were required to train and convert to the new grade of Registered General Nurse (RGN).

Up to this point student nurses often lived in a nurses’ home in the hospital grounds and when they completed their training in the hospital’s school of nursing (a mixture of practical experience and classroom study) got a job at that hospital. When project 2000 came along that all changed – many would say for the worse. Nurse training was moved to higher education so that the students could obtain a diploma leading to a degree. Student nurses were educated in blocks of several weeks then sent out to hospitals in the region (not their local hospital) so they often found themselves travelling a long way to work. Not surprisingly drop-out rates were as high as 30%.

And on top of that they were only allowed to observe not actually get their hands dirty during their first blocks of work experience. Ward sisters were not happy about that as it created staff shortages on the wards. Previously student nurses were a key part of the team and a third year student was given a lot of responsibility. But in the drive towards making nursing an all-degree profession recruiters were looking for academic potential more than caring and compassion.

This lack of caring in nursing finally came to a head after a number of scandals in care homes and hospitals and this year the Chief Nursing Officer (CNO) Jane Cummings published a three year vision and strategy called Compassion in Practice setting out the values nurses should adhere to known as the 6 Cs viz Care, Compassion, Competence, Communication, Courage, and Commitment.