The role of the nurse-specialist in the modern National Health Service

Constipated patient whose private health insurance has run out being treated by the colo-rectal nurse specialist.

I went to the dentist last week. I could not help noticing that he is no longer Mr Richards. He is Dr Richards. Had he been to medical school since my last appointment? Or maybe he has done a PhD.

It was simpler than that. He got a sign writer to change the M to a D and suddenly he is a doctor.

Why did I bother to spend ten years of my life training so that I could be called “doctor” when all I needed to do was buy some new headed notepaper?

There are twenty applicants for each place at medical school, so you have to be one of the brightest students in the country with an IQ in the top 1% or so of the population, and then you have to do five years at university, pass all the exams, and do another five to ten years post-graduate training. It is a time consuming and tiresome business. It is very expensive both for the student and for the government.

It has recently been realised that nurses are vastly more intelligent than medical students. They do not even need to go to university. They can pop into the local district general hospital for three years, do an extra twelve months at college to get a BSc (bedpan), and without more ado they are able to practise medicine. Medical students are very slow on the uptake, because it takes them nearly three times as long to get there.

This is wonderful news for the government and they are taking full advantage of it. It is much quicker and cheaper to train nurses than it is to train doctors and anyway the nurses do the job better.

There are one or two minor problems.

Because nurses have become doctors, there is no one left to do the nursing. So the ward auxiliaries are doing it. I mean, goodness knows, you don’t need any training to be a nurse, which is why those clever nurses have moved up the skills-escalator. It does not matter if all the patients are rotting away with necrotising fasciitis and MRSA because no one knows about pressure sores, or that the diabetics are dying because they are being given the wrong food at meal times, or indeed that elderly patients are lying in their own excrement because there is no one stupid enough left to deal with that sort of thing. This is not work for intelligent people.

The government spin doctors are on the case too. Any criticism of nurses, any suggestion that they are not as capable as doctors is not only non-PC, it is now treated as badly as is racism.

Gordon is a happy bunny too, because nurses earn less than doctors. When the teachers started moaning about their salaries he solved that by knighting a few headmasters. May not pay the mortgage, but it sounds good, even if you can only afford to live in a council flat. So when the nurses started moaning about their salaries, he solved that by allowing a few of them to call themselves “Consultant Nurses”.

Dr Crippen calls Consultant Nurses “medical oxymorons” which would probably annoy them if they understood what it meant.

It boosts the nursing ego to be called a “consultant nurse”. Dr Crippen is hoping, when he becomes more senior, that he may be made an honorary “doctor-nurse”. Or would it be a “nurse-doctor”?

Dr Crippen wrote this article as a direct result of Julie’s comments in "Two empty bottles with different labels?":

She says:

“As someone who has been a specialist nurse, and who often had a better grasp of the situation than GPs, Registrars or SHOs in relation to my specialist subject, please don't keep suggesting that the care they provide is in any way superior. I am afraid nurses are the future and doctors won't even belong in hospitals, since hospitals will some how be doctorless."

Dr Crippen has already covered this in “Hospital at Night 1” and “Hospital at Night 2”. Have a look at those articles again to see what is really happening.

In particular, read the document by Sue and Dave. This document is one of the most frightening examples of specious government propaganda that Dr Crippen has ever read. I could best describe it in terms of something that nurses used to be involved in before they became doctors. It is botty-wipe.

Ensuring “everyone’s got a picture of the night”. What a meaningless platitude.

Well, Sue and Dave, everyone has got a picture of your night; and everyone is getting a picture of your day as well. We are dumbing down the NHS. And Sue, and Dave, and all these specialist nurses have no insight. Look at Julie’s last sentence:

“I am afraid nurses are the future and doctors won't even belong in hospitals, since hospitals will some how be doctorless."

She is right to be afraid.

God help us all.



Picture from IF Society