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I can not find the link but I am sure I posted about this before but the NMC, those hard working fellows, have moved on to the second stage of their consultation on standards for pre-registration nursing education. Here is the blurb:
Woo. If you are not a nurse this will be of virtually no interest. If you are a nurse it is still probably of no interest. I was initially intending to write a post called How To Speak To Mad People, but it is still gestating in my head while I try to make it even more offensive. It’s a good week for people being taken to task in this week’s TWIM. Aethelred slams the Daily Express for their reporting of benefits issues, Mad Sad Girl calls out the media for their handling of the MMR-autism scare, and this week’s wildcard reveals a UKIP politician praising a terrorist attack.
Continue reading This Week in Mentalists (117) A surprising number of those campaigning against psychotherapy becoming regulated by the Health Professions Council also seem to have some sort of link with Derek Gale, the arts therapist and cult guru who was struck off by the HPC for physically, sexually and emotionally abusing his clients. People like Andrew Samuels, Professor of Analytical Psychology at Essex University and chair of the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy. The transcripts of the Derek Gale hearings describe a letter from Samuels (PDF file, pages 36 and 37) offering to supervise Gale if he was allowed to continue practising. Some might consider this a conflict of interest in Samuels’ lobbying to try to prevent psychotherapists from having to join their arts therapist colleagues on the HPC register.
Since then, Professor Samuels has started to deny ever having offered to supervise Gale. In an internet discussion on the Times website (see comments thread), he describes this offer as an “urban myth”
If Samuels refused this request, why do the transcripts say that he agreed to it? Samuels gives his explanation in, of all places, a Mental Nurse comments thread.
If that’s the case, then Professor Samuels was the victim of some profoundly unethical behaviour by Gale’s lawyer. So what’s the truth of it? Thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, we can now reveal the answer. Hi there everybody, Zarathustra is busy this weekend, so he’s asked me to write this week’s instalment of This Week in Mentalists. So as I put on a collection of my favourite 80s new wave, starting with OMD’s “Organisation” and then moving on to Kate Bush’s “The Whole Story”, please do join me for this week’s bumper crop.
It seems to be a week for news that we broke appearing in the mainstream media. In recent months we’ve highlighted the murky past of some psychotherapists who are now actively campaigning against HPC regulation of psychotherapy. Last month we discussed Professor Brian Thorne, who published an account of his wilful breaching of sexual boundaries with a female client, and who spoke in defence of Derek Gale, the abusive therapy cult guru, when Gale was up before a HPC hearing.
This has now been reported in the Times Higher Education Supplement.
Can I get an Amen, THES?
Amen! It’s now time to reflect back on the excitement of the past few days, with all the fun we’ve had at the expense of far-right astroturf operation Nurses for Reform and their “NHS? Well, it’s like Nazism” rhetoric. As we all know, there’s only one way to reflect on these matters here at Mental Nurse.
Yes, that’s right. It’s time for another caption competition.
Here’s NFR’s Dr Helen Evans at her meeting with David Cameron, where she presumably warned him of the SS Panzer divisions currently employed in our hospitals. THA ROOLZ: Enter your caption entries via the comments thread. One caption per comment – for multiple entries do multiple comments. Vote for an entry as being WIN and not FAIL by clicking on the thumbs-up icon by the side of each comment. The entry with the most points by Tuesday 2nd February is declared THA WINNAR OF TEH INTERNETS. Also on Tuesday I shall also use the same scoring system to declare a winner of the spoof nurse brands being suggested in this comments thread. Following on from yesterday’s post about Nurses for Reform, today I did a little rant over on Liberal Conspiracy, specifically focusing on Dr Helen Evans’ deeply offensive insinuation that the NHS is founded on Nazi principles.
The Liberal Conspiracy post seems to have generated quite a bit of Twitter traffic. It’s been tweeted by John Prescott and the Daily Mirror columnist Kevin Maguire, among other people. The story has also been picked up by James MacIntyre’s New Statesman blog. I’m not the only person looking into Nurses for Reform. Liberal Conspiracy’s Unity (who also writes for the anti-pseudoscience Ministry of Truth blog) has done a little digging into who actually comprises the advisory board of NFR. It turns out that, other than Dr Helen Evans, there’s only one actual nurse on the board, and he seems to spend most of his time working as a marketing consultant. The result of the board comprises a couple of doctors and an assortment of economists and policy wonks from various conservative and libertarian think-tanks. In other words, they’re an astroturf operation masquerading as campaigning nurses. I’ll conclude this post with a thought from Dr Helen Evans’ blog that she helpfully posted today.
Yes Helen. Blogging and tweeting does indeed have a role in exposing questionable political characters. UPDATE: My Liberal Conspiracy post has now been reported in today’s Daily Mirror: Thanks to Mental in his last post for pointing out the group Nurses for Reform, who I hadn’t heard of before – but I’ve had fun finding out.
As Mental says, their spokesperson Dr Helen Evans has recently been in the Nursing Times, after suggesting to David Cameron that nurses could create their own brands.
Got that? None of yer manky Tesco nurses working in our hospital. We only use Sainsburys nurses. I thought about this idea, weighed up its merits, and after recovering from the two-hour fit of convulsing, hysterical laughter, I decided to learn more about Nurses for Reform. Warning: This week’s TWIM includes some self-harm triggers.
In addition to which, we have poetry, cartoons and a punctuation-themed wildcard. Came across this at Nursingtimes.net (a far funnier site than I remember it being last time I looked at it properly):
Student nurses should quit smoking as part of training
Sadly the research was Italian so I have no idea if the figures are the same for the UK. The should probably just fail students that smoke, that will teach them a lesson. (1) The Irish health system is rather complicated, containing both a comprehensive and entirely public network of hospitals and clinics, and an equally wide-ranging system of private non-profit establishments.
In this article, we’ll have a look at the public system and how it is funded. Then, I’ll examine the parallel, private system. After that, we’ll see how the two intersect in the GP system. Finally, I’ll lay out some of the main problems the system is facing. This week we have tales from therapy, mythbusting, bipolar disorder for kids, fluoxetine for dogs….oh, and a wildcard courtesy of the people who make the BBC Speak You’re Branes site look rational.
As a patient in 2 different Irish hospitals in the 1990s, I came across a practice that I haven’t ever heard mentioned in the UK – that of the regulation of when patients are and are not allowed to wear daytime clothing on the ward.
In Big Dublin Hospital, when you were admitted you were initially permitted to wear nightwear only. Your dressing gown cord was also taken away if you were suicidal. The cord was generally returned once the staff had determined that you were no longer actively suicidal, usually within 2 or 3 days, when your consultant approved it. Generally, it took a week, or sometimes several weeks, depending on your mental state, before you were allowed to wear daytime clothing. Being allowed to wear street clothes also had to be approved by your consultant. The editors of the Mind Blog wanted some cutting-edge, talented blogger from the field of mental health nursing write a monthly post for them, but they just got me instead. This month, I blogged about….well, blogging, since it seems rather topical what with the recent TWIM awards.
On the subject of blogging on blogs about blogs, we seem to be getting an increasing number of commercial websites – usually for nursing recruitment agencies – e-mailing us offering to write a guest post for us in exchange for some linkage. Let me just say now to those sites….WE DON’T CARE! As Oldschoolbaby would be the first to state, I am a lefty-liberal pinko latte-quaffing, bruschetta-munching member of the traitorous commie Islington faggerati, and therefore not about to submit the content of this site to commercial interests. That said, anyone who’s a professional, or a patient with an interesting point of view to relate, then we most definitely are open to submissions of guest posts. Our how-to guide is online here. Here: http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/frontpage/2009/1228/1224261302831.html
Headline reads “Psychiatric wards unfit for human habitation, report finds”. |
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