Nurses lacking

The Care Quality Commission’s report that half of all English hospitals fail to provide adequate comfort and nutrition for the elderly signals the collapse of nursing ethics.

Its horrifying revelations have nothing to do with that perennial excuse, “lack of money”, but illustrate the replacement of altruism and compassion by apathy and indifference.

In recent decades, in order to achieve professional equality with doctors, nurse training was taken away from the hospitals and turned into an academic university subject.

Student nurses study sociology, politics, psychology and management with core vocational skills of caring increasingly perceived as beneath the dignity of “professionals”.

Yet Florence Nightingale wrote that “the greater part of nursing consists in preserving cleanliness and if a girl declines to perform such functions, nursing is not her calling”.

(Dr) John Cameron

Howard Place

St Andrews