We used to call them angels, so why have some nurses stopped caring?

I knew my mother Norma's 81st birthday would be poignant. She had been diagnosed with lung cancer six months earlier... and was not expected to survive the year.

But at least, I reasoned, she was being treated at the world-renowned Royal Marsden Hospital in West London. There she would not only receive the best possible treatment but be cared for by dedicated nurses accustomed to looking after the terminally ill...

But when I arrived on Horder Ward on the morning of my mother's birthday, she was distressed and disorientated. Instead of wearing the white linen pyjamas she had gone to bed in, she was wrapped in an NHS gown Gradually it emerged that she had woken up in the middle of the night in a pool of blood, terrified she was haemorrhaging. She had rung the bell next to her bed but there was no response.

Eventually a nurse turned up to discover my mother's cannula - a tube inserted into her vein and attached to a saline drip - had fallen out of her arm.

The nurse bustled around changing the sheets while my mother sat covered in blood, shivering beside the bed. When she asked for a blanket, the nurse told her to put on her flimsy cotton dressing gown, an offer she declined as she didn't want it covered in blood.

Finally she was dressed in a hospital gown, put back into bed and left alone until I arrived in the morning. 'Where are her pyjamas?' I asked the nurse. 'I don't know,' she shrugged.

We're all familiar with the problems facing the NHS: the chronic shortage of nurses, the drain on funding, target-orientated managers, government edicts...

But there's one question that cannot so easily be dismissed: when did hospital nurses stop caring?

In the larger medical community emphasis is placed on education and specialty certifications. Nurses with advanced skills and qualifications can write their own ticket. There are many nursing positions where an associate’s or LVN won’t even get you an interview and you certainly can’t climb the administrative ladder. Look at the classified ads in almost any city with more than one hospital and you will see that they compete fiercely to recruit BSN’s. To take it a step further, many nurses have chosen to obtain their master’s because they know it makes them more valuable and increases their salary significantly.

I am surprised that as a nurse you appear to denigrate the value of an advanced education. Part of the issue with patient care is undereducated nurses who don’t see the bigger picture with their patient’s health issues. Hospitals are watching their bottom line and settling for less which is a shame. Many surgical MD’s bring their own nurses to the OR and on patient rounds because the hospital staff nurses lack the skills and knowledge to care for their patients. Orthopedics and cardiac surgery are two specialties that come to mind.

Absolutely there is a place for LVN’s and two year RN’s, and they are a valuable part of today’s medical team, but when I’m admitted I want a well educated, experienced nurse leading the team that provides my nursing care not somebody who completed a one or two year junior college program.

The huge alternative would be a change in behavior of the non-paying ER visitors, because they wouldn’t be guaranteed whatever care they “need”. And of course, it would help if we wouldn’t give citizenship to babies born to women who are here illegally. These women do know how babies are made. They are getting pregnant on purpose, factoring in a number of considerations, including the free medical care for delivery and the citizenship for the baby. And the truly awful part is that the hospitals don’t verify the mother’s immigration status, and have the illegals arrested and deported (preferably before the baby is born) — they just send mom and baby on their merry way. If they were back home in Mexico or wherever, they’d give birth the natural way. Hospitals should be free to choose who they give free care to, and how much, and on what terms.

Another feature of this evil law is that it fills up the ERs with what doctors here call “frequent flyers”, deadbeats (both citizens and illegals) who are constantly showing up in ERs faking symptoms of tremendous pain and sometimes of seizures, and demanding specific drugs (not surprisingly, nearly always drugs that are frequently abused and have good resale value on the street). Needless to say, NONE of these people actually pay into the system in any manner, and yet no matter how well the doctors know this is another fake routine, they are forced to examine the patient, conduct tests, etc, all while genuinely sick patients (many of them people who actually pay) are waiting for care (sometimes dying due to the delay).

The simple truth is that putting paying patients ahead of non-paying patients, giving only skeleton services to non-payers, and simply tossing known fakers out on the street (with no fear of liability for the ones who “cried wolf” a hundred times before and finally came down with a real ailment), would result in more people who actually need medical care, getting medical care, more promptly and at a lower total cost.

Many of the non-payers who are actually sick, are people who refuse to take care of their health. Self-induced diabetes is a massive expense to our health care system, and is very disproportionately seen among the non-payers. All the free care has resulted in a culture in their communities where it is seen as perfectly acceptable to stuff yourself into diabetes, and then refuse to do anything to try to control it, and go to the hospital for free care for the inevitable kidney failure, limb amputations due to circulatory failure, eye surgery for the blinding side effects to vision, etc.

There was a big series of articles in the NY Times about this diabetes issue a couple of years ago (failing to note, of course, due to the Times socialist bent, the role of free medical care in inducing this culture of health irresponsibility). In Hispanic neighborhoods in NYC (including many illegals), the Type 2 diabetes rate is astoundingly high. One adult daughter of a non-English speaking diabetic woman was interviewed on behalf of her mother, and some of her answers were very telling. My personal favorite: “Does your mother test her blood sugar and inject insulin to try to control her diabetes?” “No, she doesn’t like needles.” But of course when her kidneys invariably fail due to her stubborn refusal to take simple steps to control her blood sugar, those of us who pay for all this will be forced to pay for her dialysis. If it weren’t for the free medical care, these people would be a huge burden on their families, and that would cause a big change in family and community culture, resulting in a great deal of pressure on people to take reasonable steps to maintain their health, and in turn resulting in most people living longer and healthier lives than they do when their whole community is addicted to “medical care is free” system.

Most medical professionals want to help sick people if they can, but care to people who aren’t paying should be on a voluntary basis. We need charity, not entitlements, as the former has a much more salutary effect on both the receivers and the givers, than does the latter.

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