ninme

I read this and thought, “public school teachers have the same problem here,” but haven’t seen anyone say as much. Anyway it’s all very, very silly:

The Times – How will a degree help a frightened patient? I see no evidence that graduates make better nurses. My fear is that too much theory risks making them ‘too posh to wash’, by Raymond Tallis (Professor of Geriatric Medicine at the University of Manchester and author of Hippocratic Oaths: Medicine and Its Discontents)

There is, however, a deeper concern about the proposal. It will not address the failures of basic care that all of us have witnessed when visiting the bedsides of friends and relatives in hospital. Indeed, it may exacerbate the problem.

The emphasis on the academic aspects of nursing, rather than practical skills and the deeply humane activity of hands-on care, may constitute a kind of “dumbing up”. Focusing on more abstract and theoretical issues, which a degree course, as opposed to vocational training, would require, might diminish the commitment to basic nursing — a fear captured in the much used phrase: “too posh to wash”. This is dangerous, particularly at a time when such care is undervalued — though not by those who receive it. One could be forgiven for thinking that the rewards and prestige of nursing rise in proportion to the distance from the bedside.

The Sunday Times – Oh nurse, your degree is a symptom of equality disease, by Minette Marrin

One of the government’s sillier initiatives was its announcement last week that in future all NHS nurses must have a university degree. From 2013, all would-be nurses will have to have taken a three- or four-year university course to enter the profession. The disastrous consequences of this ought to be obvious to the meanest Whitehall intelligence.

All sorts of people who might make excellent nurses will be put off, and lost to nursing: anyone who is not particularly academic; anyone who — frankly — is not particularly bright; anyone who has a vocation to care for patients without wishing for the most high-tech training; anyone who is unable to take on a mass of student debt on a nurse’s poor pay; any late entrants — and this at a time when the NHS is desperately short of nurses.

And…

Nurses — or rather those who claim to represent them — want to have the status of professionals, on a level with doctors, and part of being a professional is having a degree. So nurses must have degrees.

All of them.

What’s particularly depressing is that this obsession with status is not unique to the nursing establishment; it has become a national obsession, of which this is just one expression.

It’s what explains the feeling that everyone must go to university now and the government’s determination to turn 50% of all school-leavers into undergraduates, regardless of the consequences. (There have been some suggestions that the government welcomes the idea of sending all nurses to university because it will effortlessly bump up the student numbers closer to the promised 50%.)