NURSING CARE in Britain’s hospitals is so poor that some doctors prescribe water to make sure patients don’t become dehydrated. Socialized medicine and the feminist devaluation of nursing have been a disaster for patient care, argues Melanie Phillips in The Daily Mail. The ethic of nursing has changed. Careerism and competence have replaced vocation and basic compassion.

Phillips writes:

[D]uring the Eighties, nursing underwent a revolution. Under the influence of feminist thinking, its leaders decided that ‘caring’ was demeaning because it meant that nurses — who were overwhelmingly women — were treated like skivvies by doctors, who were mostly men.

To achieve equality, therefore, nursing had to gain the same status as medicine. This directly contradicted an explicit warning given by Florence Nightingale that nurses should steer clear of the ‘jargon’ about the ‘rights’ of women ‘which urges women to do all that men do, including the medical and other professions, merely because men do it, and without regard to whether this is the best that women can do’.

That prescient warning has been ignored by the modern nursing establishment. To achieve professional equality with doctors, nurse training was taken away from the hospitals and turned into an academic university subject.

Since caring for patients was demeaning to women, it could no longer be the cardinal principle of nursing. Instead, the primary goal became to realise the potential of the nurse to achieve equality with men. (The great irony is that more women than men are now training to be doctors in British medical schools, thus making this ideology out of date.)

                                                                         — Comments —

Sage McLaughlin, who sent the article, writes:

Socialized medicine (like anything that becomes “socialized”) inevitably diffuses responsibility for caring for the sick into that nebulous “society” that is responsible for everything, leaving individuals personally responsible for almost nothing.

Laura writes:

Nursing is in much better shape in the U.S. And feminism has not destroyed an ethic of caring. But nursing today requires so much training that it is not a job women can enter and exit as freely as in the past.

John E. writes:

Laura writes:

And feminism has not destroyed an ethic of caring.

I have observed this each time we have been to the hospital for the birth of our three children. Clearly some nurses were better than others, but they all (all women) unabashedly included in their service to my wife and children the touch of feminine care that is natural to the female sex, the same feminine care against which the feminists are waging war.

Greg Jinkerson writes:

I’m heartened to read that John E. and his wife experienced feminine nursing for their children’s births, and I would agree that feminism has not driven away all traces of love or compassion from the ranks of nurses. But there are some troubling signs that our American nursing industry is succumbing to some of the trends lamented by Melanie Phillips. Prior to the birth of our son, my wife worked for about a year as a nurse. She loved her work, but was so discouraged by her time in nursing school that she nearly quit several times before finishing her degree. She was in school for about two years to become a licensed practical nurse and she had two primary complaints about the experience. The first trouble was that most of her peers, who were nearly all women, plainly stated that they were pursuing nursing as a career because they wanted to make a lot of money. The potential income had nothing to do with my wife’s interest in nursing, beyond the ordinary expectation. She was drawn to nursing as a form of ministry, and she was constantly saddened to hear the other students announcing that they were in this for the money.

The other problem was the irrelevance of the course content itself, including some very intensive study of all kinds of biological and medical information that I would have assumed would be more appropriate for medical school rather than for someone pursuing a position as a nurse. My mother-in-law began the program at the same time as my wife, pursuing a mutual dream they had long held. But the coursework was way too much for my mother-in-law, who had been out of school for many years and who had assumed that she was enrolling in a kind of vocational training. She later found a very fulfilling job as a home health worker, a type of work that has not yet been subjected to draconian state controls. The trend of legislating ever more state controls over all kinds of ordinary traditional jobs is of course an inevitable result of artificial top-down elitism, which always assumes the necessity of the Gnostic state blessing before a candidate is fit to act in any way. As Phillips notes, the transformation of our conception of nursing is another classic result of feminism. You take one of the traditional enclaves of femininity like nursing, one where the beauty of natural sex distinctions was manifest for all to see, and you impose new obstacles to entry, requiring hitherto unknown forms of credentialing for the sake of spurious political ideals.

Laura writes:

Given that hospitals face the possibility of expensive lawsuits if nurses make mistakes, this demanding coursework seems to serve the purpose of eliminating the less able. (Due to civil rights legislation and regulations, a hospital can’t turn down a candidate without an official reason. The lack of a degree provides a legitimate reason to eliminate those who may not be qualified to learn on the job.) It’s much more of a career than it once was. It seems that the changes in nursing you mention have as much to do with larger changes in medicine, with consumerist standards and technological change having eroded the trust between practitioners and patients.

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