http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7478439.stm
I found this archive footage pretty entertaining not only for historical but also for personal reasons.
The images of those nurses have made me think that while many, many, many things have changed in the healthcare universe, very very little has changed in the concept of what a NURSE nowadays really is. In the footage we see nurses making beds, cups of tea, cleaning the ward. Very little has changed since. In the UK, Nursing is now a university degree that doesn't really reflect what's going on in the hospitals or even at other institutions around the world. It has always surprised me that patients expect doctors to be professional and nurses to be nice and caring. This is the image we manage to perpetuate year after year. This is the reason why the nursing profession can't advance in the UK. They are surrounded by various enemies who still see them as 'nice but not too clever', by deeply entrenched unwritten rules in the health care institutions who tell them about their limitations, by their own low self-esteem.
The nurses on the video are prototypes of the values of the profession. The nurses are beautiful, kind, caring, clean. All those adjectives sound familiar to me. Of course! That's also what is expected from any WOMAN.
To work as a nurse in a hospital many professional skills are necessary. Knowledge. Procedures to master. You need to be intelligent, a good communicator, possess good time management skills. Nurses are like glue; without them the ward collapses. Nobody seems to realise.
Thinks haven't changed at all. Add a bit of colour and a different uniform (no so different though..) and you have a 21st c hospital ward. Feminine professions always get a hard time in history. The worst is that most of us still don't know. We do live in and island and we don't want to extend bridges to see beyond.
I found this archive footage pretty entertaining not only for historical but also for personal reasons.
The images of those nurses have made me think that while many, many, many things have changed in the healthcare universe, very very little has changed in the concept of what a NURSE nowadays really is. In the footage we see nurses making beds, cups of tea, cleaning the ward. Very little has changed since. In the UK, Nursing is now a university degree that doesn't really reflect what's going on in the hospitals or even at other institutions around the world. It has always surprised me that patients expect doctors to be professional and nurses to be nice and caring. This is the image we manage to perpetuate year after year. This is the reason why the nursing profession can't advance in the UK. They are surrounded by various enemies who still see them as 'nice but not too clever', by deeply entrenched unwritten rules in the health care institutions who tell them about their limitations, by their own low self-esteem.
The nurses on the video are prototypes of the values of the profession. The nurses are beautiful, kind, caring, clean. All those adjectives sound familiar to me. Of course! That's also what is expected from any WOMAN.
To work as a nurse in a hospital many professional skills are necessary. Knowledge. Procedures to master. You need to be intelligent, a good communicator, possess good time management skills. Nurses are like glue; without them the ward collapses. Nobody seems to realise.
Thinks haven't changed at all. Add a bit of colour and a different uniform (no so different though..) and you have a 21st c hospital ward. Feminine professions always get a hard time in history. The worst is that most of us still don't know. We do live in and island and we don't want to extend bridges to see beyond.
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