Am I Dreaming?
I go to sleep feeling unwell. I am sore and my head hurts. I think about work, it is always on my mind, there is no escape. I am soon wandering through a forest in the dark. I hear noises and I think I am lost. I meet an owl, but no ordinary owl. He tells me that I am in control but I need to find my feet. He tells me I have powers that I am unaware off and so I am trying to find out what these are. I walk further and I feel scared. I run very fast, hearing footsteps behind me. I start to soar above the trees, I am in control, and I can fly. When I can’t control it I soar too high and I look down at the sheer drop below me. How am I doing this? I start to drop and I sink, my legs feel heavy and I try to run but I can’t anymore. It feels like I know longer know how to run. I look down at the grass and it is dying as I tread on it. The grass emits an odour, I feel sick. I need to eat but there is no food. I try to eat an apple but as soon as I take a bite I feel it sticking in my throat, I awake feeling ill. I am still sore and my throat hurts. I should have phoned in sick but I didn’t. I need to phone, I do not feel well. I phone in sick and I lie back down feeling the dread build up inside me, thinking about how much more trouble I have caused for myself. My crime was to become unwell I will soon suffer. Two more days go by and I still feel ill. I have developed a bad cold. I should not be absent, but if I go in to work, not only will I be giving my germs to patients but I could become a liability. I justify my reasons to myself at the same time knowing the NHS are not so understanding and they would sooner I came back ill to save costs. I have a meeting with my bosses about my work and my union steward will be there.
Margaret Thatcher , who is she?
I sit awaiting my verdict like a prisoner on trial while there is discussion about me. It is agreed that I will try out a new area. I am to leave Mary Poppins behind it feels so good. I am released from her grasp. It feels like I can breathe again as fingers one by one are peeled back from choking me. I could not have done it without my union. In this day and age people think unions are a thing of the past and that they all ran away from the iron fist of a certain previous Conservative leader called Margaret Thatcher; let me assure you that unions are a thing of now and of our future. If it were not for our unions, our working conditions would be equal to slavery. You would have no rights; it is the unions that have battled for your conditions and your pay. I urge you all to join. You out there who benefits from your colleagues subscriptions, it is time to join your union. It does not cost you much.I am not used to dealing with respiratory patients but I soon get to work learning all I can. The thought of collecting sputum has always turned my stomach, I guess even us nurses have our limits. I meet my new boss; she seems alright with me but she is not friendly. This is normal in terms of charge nurses, I have come to learn. I start to enjoy learning new skills and gradually settle in over a couple of weeks. Some of the nurses are nice but they still will not show me much. I try to learn from books and the internet. As nurses we are supposed to keep up to date anyway. I go into the staff room for my break one Tuesday night shift and get speaking to a really nice nurse who shares her experiences with me.
I ask her how I have not seen her before to which she says that she is a pool nurse. I never knew what the nurse pool was. She said that it was the same as me but she could work anywhere. She was a really experienced nurse and her skills are clearly remarkable. She said she only works nights because she has children and she had to leave her previous area because she could not get childcare for the long shifts. Nurse shifts are normally twelve and a half hours and usually start at 7.30 until 20.00. Then night shift starts at 1930 until 0800. We get an official one hour unpaid break, usually two half hours. I did not have children but planned to have them one day. I could not imagine how I would manage with childcare. This must be the most bizarre of employment that does not support women with children and yet the majority of nurses are women. Surely it is discrimination because as I think I understand it, there are no childcare facilities beyond 6pm and before 8am. Yet we have nurses with children expected to work these long hours. If this same scenario was applied to disabled people, that there is no disability rights beyond 6pm then they would rightfully be campaigning to change it. Why should women with children rights to employment in the NHS be lessened due to the expectations of long working hours? If I had children would I need to leave my job because I could not get childcare beyond 6pm? Why is it in the first place that women, with children are expected to work beyond the normal childcare facilities times? Surely those with children should be allowed to work during daytimes? Should there not be automatic rights to flexible working hours? Perhaps this would help retain more nursing staff. I wonder if there has ever been a survey done on the levels of nurses leaving due to childcare restrictions. Surely it would be cheaper in the long run to keep nurses that are trained. I know that there are some wards that are very flexible with working hours for those with children but largely it is still quite rigid. Off duty is done by those in charge and if you can’t do the hours allocated you could get a hard time. Could this also lead to bullying, I wonder? It’s alright for those in charge with their nice daytime hours but for the rest of us, we have these long hours that do not suit us all. It surely is time to take nursing into the contemporary era that we now live instead of constantly looking back. Sure we can learn from previous years but society has changed and it is always changing.
Matron Your Time is up.
Nurses no longer live in residence with the Matron deciding what time her staff can go to bed at night and if it is alright for her staff to get married. This authoritarian type of matron should be dead and buried along with the previous useless nurses hats that served no purpose other than get in the way. We are always told that in our modern age in the UK that we do not live in a totalitarian society. Why does this exist in nursing when politics have changed around it? Political leaders attempting to score more points talk about the past NHS as something good to go back too. The only good thing was that there were more beds for patients and patients were not thrown out of them before they were well enough to go home. Oh how good the old days were with no MRSA and other HAI’s! Let’s go back there for a little reflection. Even 50 years ago the average life span was a lot less. We still had Nightingale wards. Death rates from respiratory conditions were common as we had no vaccines to flu or pneumonia and it was common for women and children to die in childbirth. The sophisticated operating procedures that we now take for granted did not exist and during an operation instead of keyhole techniques there would have been massive incisions with greater blood loss. We would not have had the greatness of screening procedures that we take for granted in preventative medicine. So let us stop looking back to the good old days they are in the past. We have now advanced in medicine let us now advance in working practice. Bye bye Matron it’s time for retirement, we need to work as a team now, we do not need your authority or bullying tactics, our job is difficult enough. It is up to us all to manage to keep our hospitals clean not a Matron; if we do not know how to clean our hands then we should not be working there in the first place. So give us some credit that we know how to wash our hands and let you all be assured that we do wash our hands. We do not need some matriarchal figure watch us wash our hands. With the greatness of modern medicine more patients can be seen in a year.
However, the high turnover of patients in today’s era means that per year on average we are seeing an increase of patients using the same ward and the same beds. So potentially a ward could have different patients within hours. For example a patient admitted into a bed for a non emergency gall bladder removal could be replaced the next day with another patient. It is common now for this operation to be done as an inpatient day case as are many other procedures. If this operation was done on a daily basis on a five day working week, in that same bed in just one month there could have been 20 patients using it. That could potentially be 100 patients just in five months with all variances of additional diseases that the patients have. A four bedded area in a ward in just five months could have on average 400 patients sharing the bathroom facilities and then we wonder why there are HAI’s. The answer to HAI’s is complex but there should not be any patients sharing rooms. All single rooms with en suite facilities are the only way to go and if a patient can go home, home is the best place to be. I hear the horror of those reading this wondering about the cost of redesigning hospitals, better that than the cost of the NHS being sued for unnecessary deaths due to HAI’s. One death is one death too many. So, I finish my break and get back to work.
A Meer Trifle
When I get back on to the ward the crash team are all swarming over a patient. The patient is saved but will not last long and is taken to High Dependency. I look in on my patients and they are all asking what the commotion was. We are not allowed to discuss patients with other patients so it sometimes makes it difficult when other patients ask about each other. ‘It alright,’ I inform them, ‘a patient is just unwell’. There are some aspects of this job I still do not know about, so I ask a nurse who reminds me of a meerkat if I can try to apply humidified oxygen as I have not done that yet. I ask if she will show me but she looks at me as though I am someone to be despised, the mother or wife of a killer or worse a killer myself. What have I done to deserve this? I only asked! She turns around staring at me with utter contempt and says, ‘it’s alright I will do it’. Her neck is long and she is always looking around her. Her name coincidentally is katherine and everyone calls her Kat.
True enough, she has never spoken to me. She blanks me in the corridor and I always say hello. So, there is always one! Surely, things will get better. The Sister calls me in, and asks how I am getting on. I reply that I feel happy here and that I will soon settle in. She looks at me and does not smile. Her face takes on the resemblance of Hattie Jacques from the film Carry on Matron and she looks quite strict. ‘Well’, I think, ‘at least things will not be so bad because Mary Poppins would be worse.’ She shows me my record. ‘This record is not very good, you have a lot to learn’, she says. ‘I do not mind learning,’ I answer. ‘You need to go back to basics again,’ she says. ‘You are not a good nurse as I have heard a lot from your previous boss.’’ Well,’ she would say that because she bullied me,’ I say. She turns around with her face dark red and shouts, ‘how dare you speak to me about my colleague. ‘I do not want to hear any more about this.’ I go out the room in complete disbelief. This is not what I thought it would be like. I ask a nicer member of staff what this sister is like. 'She is a big bully,' I am told. ‘Stay away from her and you should be alright.’ I find out her history and it turns out she previously worked with Mary Poppins and they are best friends. I can hardly believe it, I took on another post to get away from her but it seems I am not so free. I feel the shackles go back around my throat. Battle axe Hattie is on to me and things may be worse. She stands watching me, I feel on edge as I try hard to fit in. I am bumped into and pushed aside by Kat and told to go and take observations on other patients after I shout for help as a patient collapses with a cardiac arrest. I did the right thing as we get the crash team in to help us. I guess I will always remain at the bottom and they will always ensure I stay that way. Kat goes in front of me to the changing room. She must only be in her early twenties. She checks her face and hair in the mirror; she likes to keep brushing her hair and always has loads of lipstick on. Her perfume is overpowering and it is difficult to breathe when she sprays it. She coughs really hard as it affects her too but as she coughs something falls out her mouth. Her teeth land on the carpeted floor. She sees that I notice them and she looks embarrassed. I smile inwardly but dare not let her see me. What goes around comes around I always say. I walk away but heavy hearted, this may not be what I thought. Is nursing for me? I sit down in my car and turn on the radio. I look out at the sky and see the moon shining bright with all the stars twinkling. I look down at my steering wheel and stare at my car logo in the centre. I imagine life before nursing. I feel flat.I listen to the music that beats out...
"Butterflies And Hurricanes, Muse"
change,
everything you are
and everything you were
your number has been called
fights, battles have begun
revenge will surely come
your hard times are ahead
best,
you've got to be the best
you've got to change the world
and you use this chance to be heard
your time is now
change,
everything you are
and everything you were
your number has been called
fights and battles have begun
revenge will surely come
your hard times are ahead
best,
you've got to be the best
you've got to change the world
and you use this chance to be heard
your time is now
don't,
let yourself down
don't let yourself go
your last chance has arrived
best,
you've got to be the best
you've got to change the world
and you use this chance to be heard
your time is now
