Column

Carry on nursing

Eric the Heretic defends traditional health service values

It doesn’t seem five minutes since I was enjoying the sight of Brian Mawhinney getting in a sweat about sex at school. As well he might. In fact, he got so excited about the whole thing that he prematurely withdrew a pocket guide to sex that the Health Education Authority was about to publish, and then came to a climax over a school nurse in Leeds who had been answering too many tricky questions from the kids.

Giving straight answers to straight questions is something which doesn’t come easily to politicians, of course, so it makes them nervous when other people do it.

Anyway, it seems to be that time of year again. This year’s the Department of Stealth has objected that nurses are being told too much about sex. They say that the RCN’s new training manual for community nurses is too explicit.

Well, for once they’re absolutely right. Nurses have enough to cope with, without being forced to stare at pictures of naked bottoms and who knows what else. They wouldn’t dream of publishing such nonsense if Hattie Jacques was still a matron.

Nurses should be allowed to get on with what they are good at, which is sticking on plasters and mopping feverish brows, plus all the other technical things they have to learn about these days. Monitors and machines that go beep.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying we should just ignore these teenage pregnancies the RCN is trying to put a stop to. But there seems to be an unhealthy tendency these days, as soon as somebody spots a new ‘social problem’, to rush off and set up a ‘unit’ somewhere in the health service to deal with it. Or complain that medical students don’t get any training in it. Or write a new manual on it for nurses.

Surely these social problems can’t all be the responsibility of the NHS. The whole system would grind to a halt. Imagine falling out of an upstairs window, going to your local casualty department with a broken leg, and being told ‘Sorry, we can’t see you yet, we’re just dealing with an emergency case of post-redundancy low income syndrome’. No, the NHS should stick to what it’s good at, varicose veins and hernia repairs.

Anyway, everyone knows that nurses know far too much about sex already.

Eric the Heretic is senior lecturer at the University of Life.