I trained as a nurse way back in the 1970's. I loved it all, but I could see that it wasn't quite right that students were used as cheap labour. We were employed and trained by the hospital and there was a lot of snobbery about where you trained. Teaching hospitals and especially the London ones were always considered better than the provincial ones. Surely a nurse is a nurse? I trained at my local county hospital and considered it to be excellent. I was a student union rep and was at the beginning of the quest to get nursing more academic. Oh for the sake of hindsight! Today we are so far removed from how I trained and worked it is laughable.
What I think we need is to have some of the old ways knitted in with today's academia, and that learning should come towards the end of the course. If all student nurses did a full 12-18 months entirely ward based, learning how to look after people, doing all the mundane jobs and married it up with the academia after that, not only would you get nurses who knew how to care, they would know the why behind it all and more importantly if they didn't like the caring bit they would maybe leave before the studying bit! This may sound simplistic, but we have to get back to the basic roots of nursing and that is caring for people before anything else.
