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I liked the Professor in the first video. Even though he also spoke fluent manager.

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But this comment I did take exception to:

So, come on Mental Nurse. What do you make of this bearded Telly Tubby? You seem to rate the University of Warwick and men with beards. What, precisely, is he saying? Go on, tell me. Explain it to me. And when you have done that, let us look at the over-promoted nurse specialist in the video.

It is as plain as the hair on my face what I am upset by. Beards. I do like men with beards. I also like women with beards. My mother, herself, is a very bearded woman ! So please can we just leave facial hair out of this discussion ?

Thank you.

I would just like to add that I support and agree with Z in almost everything he has posted on this subject. I am enjoying watching from the sidelines thoroughly.

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Oops, I did it again, as a great philosopher once wrote.

I think next time we change the tagline it should be to “normally excellent”.

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Debate : Doctors for the rich, nurse specialists for the poor

At least we are normally excellent !

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But I’m not so sure the HCA/nurse - doctor/nurse comparison is so straightforward.

On average Quacks have 10yrs post-grad experience, on top of basic nursing registration, /- a BSc or BA.

Needless to say many of these nurses have ‘man managed’, and are professionally mandated to provide evidence of CPD, this usually entails, as a minimum, a specialty specific course [taken over 1 academic year at level 2/3 - in our case the ENB 199, or equivalent] plus a teaching/mentorship course [ENB 998 or similar].

On top of this, again using A&E as an example, most of the senior nurses have done ALS & ATLS /- APLS.

In our department the NPs must also complete additional training [A33 or equivalent] plus a further module, snappily entitled ‘Advanced Physical Assessment’.

While academic standards are obviously very important the crux of the NP role, as I see it, is to liberate nursing talent that only comes with many years of experience [although I'm not suggesting that experience alone is likely to be sufficient] - the PLNs are a case in point, relatively autonomous senior nurses who bring great benefits to patients attending A&E.

Personally, I’m not too keen on glass ceilings or artificial barriers [although I understand many nurses have acompletely different take on this issue] - as Woody Allen once said;

‘those that can, do…… those that can’t, teach…..and those that can’t teach, teach gym.

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Even so, the boundaries between nursing and medicine have been shifting long before Nude Labour came on the scene. Time was when if a patient needed his blood pressure checking, a junior doctor would be summoned to do it. Nowadays a HCA does it routinely by pressing a button. No doubt when nurses started picking up a sphygmomanometer the Dr Crippens of the time started muttering about “dumbing down” and nurses “not having the skills” for this task.

As for blood pressure checking, see also: venepuncture, cannulation, catheterisation, IV drug administration - all tasks that used to be done only by doctors and now done regularly by nurses.

I’d like to see the debate on advanced nursing roles being opened up a bit and becoming more refined. Rather than simply a blanket: “Nurse specialists and nurse practitioners: good or bad?” debate, I’d like to see people talk about the variety of roles and which ones are and aren’t appropriate to be performed by nurses. At the moment there’s no middle ground to the argument. Nobody seems to be saying, “I think nurse specialists do a good job at a-b-c, but I don’t think they should be doing d-e-f.”

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Or, as he might also be described, the Professor of Emergency Medicine at the University of Warwick.

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