Review

Committment to caring

NURSING PRACTICE, POLICY AND CHANGE
Marjorie Gott (ed)
Radcliffe Medical Press, 2000

Few doubt that the NHS is suffering crisis after crisis, and whenever we are consumers of healthcare we find ourselves much concerned with its major workforce – nurses. Yet to study the health service or to read about it in anything but the nursing press, is to find a massive emphasis on medical practitioners and management.

Marjorie Gott has brought the full weight of her nursing background to bear upon this issue. She has assembled contributors (including herself) who examine the realities of the NHS by attempting to bring together the concepts (and problems) of health policy with nursing practice.

Her contributors are not limited to the UK, and the overseas contributors have a great deal to teach us. The NHS is not the first caring service to struggle with a commitment to caring while weighing that commitment against costings and shifting priorities in care.

During the last decade, all nursing students have been repeatedly informed that they are ‘the managers of the future’, and no doubt this is true. Unfortunately nurse education has not equipped qualifying nurses with any better grasp of management issues (or how to join them to people management issues) than any previous system of training or education.

Marjorie Gott attempts to marry these concepts. If student nurses are to graduate as nurses, rather than as mini-managers, pseudo-academics and uncertain carers, then this book should be required reading for all.

Reading lists are no longer proposed or supported by the universities which currently govern nurse education, but personally I cannot recommend this book highly enough. I would say to anyone, health professional or not, who has an interest in the developing the health service of the 21st century — read this book.