Mental Nurse

Time for our Sunday round-up of the week’s nursing blogs.

It’s a bit of a brief one this week. I think I need to find more nurse blogs to add to my list. So far most of the blogs I’ve been reading have been either student nurses (Didn’t Want to Be a Doctor, The Oracle, and my new find Northern Nurse) or bloggers in senior nurse posts…charge nurses (Mouse Thinks), nurse practitioners (It Shouldn’t Happen in Health Care, News from Unscheduled Care), nurse managers (Life in the NHS). Where’s the blogs by staff nurses? So far I’ve got Crazy Nurse, who I variously include under either Weekly Handover or This Week in Mentalists, depending on whether I think it’s more of a nursing or a mental health type post, and that’s it other than the sadly dormant Militant Medical Nurse. I need more staff nurse blogs. Or HCA blogs, for that matter.

To nominate a blog e-mail zarathustra at mentalnurse dot org dot uk

Student Nurses

The Oracle has been to the Royal College of Nursing Congress.

I have discovered that I am a much nicer person when I have been drinking- the coach journey home from Congress yesterday was interesting to say the least. A wonderful time was had by all. Obviously the bottle of white wine helped no end. I also have enough pens and free samples of diprobase to last me at least a year- a day well spent.

Pfft, when I visited the RCN Congress as a student I came away with pens, diprobase, sudocrem, boxes of breakfast cereal, an inflatable globe, a polaroid camera and, most impressive to me of all….an inflatable egg cup. RCN Congress is excellent for scrounging.

Rather topically given some of the issues we’ve been discussing elsewhere on this blog, Northern Nurse discusses disciplinary issues.

There is almost a paranoia in some areas of nursing, because of this, about “covering your back”. The most innocuous events are religiously recorded in the notes, the minutiae of the decisions and perceived failings of other professionals are scrupulously written down. “Incident forms” are filed whenever somebody makes a mistake (unless it’s you, in which case you do your damndest to keep it quiet). Everybody is petrified that somebody is going to pull up their notes some day and think “Aha! This nurse recorded a temperature of 37.2 degrees on the obs chart but didn’t think to mention anything about it in the written notes! They must be negligent - let’s get ‘em!”

Nurse Manager

Life in the NHS looks at the new NMC Code of Professional Conduct.

Nurses in 2008 are stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea. On one hand they are meant to be caring individuals who understand the social and psychological needs of their patients and who know one end of the body from the other (mainly so that they can provide appropriate care). On the other hand they need to be able to develop more specialised skills so that they can take on specific roles that some doctors (but not all) have become tired with or who quite rightly see that nurses might actually be pretty good at taking on.

Nurses can’t just complete their pre-registration training, take their RN qualification and go off into the sunset (thank goodness), they can’t just go about their lives forgetting they are nurses when it suits them. Nurses are required to conduct themselves in a particular way that is becoming to their nursing qualification and what is more, the new code of conduct, produced by our regulator the Nursing and Midwifery Council and released officially this week is quite specific.