I could not believe it when I heard about a grade six nurse being made redundant in Salisbury, only the week before I had been chatting to an old college of mine who also told me that the primary care trust for that area felt that we had to many senior nurses, the lady who has been made redundant went to our local hospital to put herself down for bank nursing but they turned her down stating she had not nursed in a hospital for so long and they could not afford to train bank staff. The main thing that amazes me is that last year I was in the local hospital on a ward as a patient, it only had one senior nurse who was rushed off her feet and the other nursing staff were mainly care staff or nurses from a foreign country with very poor English, this make no sense at all as it was five years ago the government set about an urgent training plan to get more qualified nurses into the NHS.
The grade six nurses that I worked with had fantastic skill bases and so much experience, I felt proud to work along side them, these are the very people we need in our hospitals, yes they are on higher wages but they really do save lives with their knowledge they often pick up signs of infection before a doctor ever sees the patient, this also makes me think of a head line in last weeks paper about a German doctor on call over here who had never been tested, no one questioned his skill base and yes he in effect killed our patients, it is time we valued quality staff, maybe cut back on the very costly managers but please keep our nurses working.
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