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This is the amount of snow (I believe ‘dusting’ is the correct term) for all of the trains in the south-east to become fucked.
Also, to celebrate the snow fall, and the reduced service Southeastern Trains also cut the number of carriages on some of the services.
Written by exmonkey on January 25th, 2007 with 3 comments.
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This Flickr user has too much time on his hands - but gawd bless him, he’s out there and doing it for us.
Written by exmonkey on January 12th, 2007 with no comments.
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When I was still a registered nurse and regularly donning rubber gloves to do unspeakable things to complete strangers for a living, I used to get really annoyed when non-medical people would tell me that what the NHS needed was the return of the matrons. I dismissed it as unqualified nostalgia for simpler times. It was my opinion that such views were generally held by people whose only real experience in working on a ward was watching Carry on Doctor.
I’ve changed my mind.
Obviously I don’t think we should turn our back on advances in practice - egg white and oxygen will not cure pressure sores (bed sores to you “Carry On” viewers).
Draconian as it sounds, here are the things that nurses stopped doing that maybe someone should enforce.
You are probably think that these kind of rules already exist in hospitals. I mean, cleaning and smart dress is common sense no? Wrong. The problem is, nurses are now professionals.
When I trained (class of ‘92) we were the last year to learn the so called ‘traditional methods’. The students who came after us took their lectures in a university. They were ’supernumerary’ - which is a fancy term meaning ‘don’t do any actual hands on nursing care’.
This new style of training is all part of the nurses obsession with becoming a ‘profession’. In recent years, nurses have complained that they are not treated as equals to Doctors and other professionals. The solution (proposed by government and embraced wholeheartedly by nurses) was to pursue the American system of training, which turns out highly qualified ‘professionals’ who would take more of a managerial role on hospitals. The actual dirty work would be done by Health Care Assistants (HCAs), who would in turn be educated using the new NVQ system. This whole endeavour was called Project 2000, and the fact that it had been running for 10 years in the USA and had been judged a failure didn’t stop nurses from being hypnotized by the glamour of degrees and diplomas.
Nurses have a huge inferiority complex that they try and salve by collecting qualifications and awards. They have been so busy massaging their own fragile sense of self worth with bits of paper that they haven’t noticed that standards of nursing care have gone through the floor.
The remarkable thing is that, during my working life as a nurse, we were constantly implementing new measures and ‘tool’ to evaluate the effectiveness of nursing care (using ‘models of nursing’ and other great buzz words), and yet, inexplicably, none of these research based changes in the way we practised nursing actually improved the overall health of our hospitals.
Those nurses most adept at getting on courses and training seminars, those with the most letters and ENB qualifications attached to their professional portfolio were soon able to achieve what all nurses really wanted. A way out of nursing. The floated to the top of the nursing hierarchy, doffed the uniform and donned the cheap suit to take up tenuous positions of power along side the doctors and other management.
A few nurses have stayed behind. These people were hard working, caring (remember when to be a nurse was to care?) and experienced individuals. However the system that rewards bits of paper, employs private firms to cook the food, clean the hospitals and staff the wards destroys the conscientious, hard working traditional nurse. You will meet these real nurses sometimes (even in hospitals) they almost always look tired and beaten.
Nursing (and by extension the NHS) is fucked. I don’t think it’s too late to retrace our steps to the point where it all went shit-shaped and try and fix it - but I don’t think this will happen. Nurses are still to blinkered to realise what they have lost, to in-love with their ‘professional’ status and to inclined to spend their time stabbing their colleagues in the back to do anything about the mess they are in part responsible for.
I’m sure that there are plenty of nurses who will read this and say - “Well I guess this person is bitter about
Bollocks to you - nursing is the way it is because of nurses. I wish I had the money to go private.
Written by exmonkey on January 12th, 2007 with 2 comments.
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This may or may-not be a new thing from BBC Online - but I have just spent a happy half hour watching and reading some of the interactive cooking guides on the new BBC ‘Get Cooking‘ microsite.
It really is fantastic - hundreds of recipes, advice on buying and using knives, how to make stock… it’s all there.
And I thought the internet was just good for porn.
Written by exmonkey on January 3rd, 2007 with 3 comments.
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