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NURSE ROSALYN WARNER |
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NURSE ROSALYN WARNER |
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| My decision to be a nurse hadn't been a forgone conclusion. I’d even studied computer science in college, but that was in the days of punched cards and large magnetic tape reels. Computers have come a long way since those days and so has nursing. Unfortunately something has to give to make way for new ideas. In modern nursing bedside care has unfortunately been replaced with a continually growing paper mountain. It seems paperwork has a growth mechanism all of its own, totally out of proportion to its need. |
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I spent three years at the North Colchester District School of Nursing in Essex, only 20 miles from my home town of Harwich. In that time I was taught everything from basic bed making and how to scrub bedpans, to wound care and cardiac arrest procedures. We spent time in all the different specialties of the profession and at the impressive age of 21 years I eventually qualified as a State Registered Nurse S.R.N. |  |
| Only a month later the nursing bureaucracy in Britain was totally reorganised and I was then known as a Registered General Nurse. I was now licensed to care and I took to my career with dedication. |  |
Nurses in those days ran on pure dedication. They certainly didn’t run on the pay cheques because a nurse barely earned enough to live on, even if they lived in the subsidised Nurses Home. |
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After a total of eighteen months working on the general wards in my local district hospital, I decided to throw myself in at the deep end and join the prison service as a hospital officer. I would be catering for the medical needs of those persons determined by law to require segregation from the rest of society. First I’d have to train as a prison officer for six months and then spend three months working as one. With trepidation I ventured north to the Prison Service Training School at Wakefield in order to learn the security aspect of the job. |
| A prison is one of those places that most people tend to block out of their conscious thoughts. They pretend the convicts have ceased to exist once they’re behind bars but unfortunately they don’t just disappear, they still need medical attention. As much as the public like to pretend that convicts have temporarily ceased to exist, to the prison hospital staff they’re all to real. |  |
| The boredom of incarceration encourages the exaggeration of the most trivial of ailments. Whereas in the community the family GP and the local casualty unit are flooded by minor ailments, because this is the negative side of free medicine, in prison the lack of alternative distractions encourages an extensive sick parade. It’s a way to meet your fellow prisoners from other wings and at least an hour or so out of your cell. The only negative side of this coin, is the possibility of a hospital officer rewarding a persistently sick inmate with a few weeks on the psychiatric wing, under observation for hypochondria. For some reason this would encourage a miraculous recovery from any malingering convicts. |
| Other duties of a hospital officer would involve any form of medicine possible. Drug addicts and alcoholics withdrawing from their chemical crutches were very common. The down and outs of London would arrive in reception crawling with any kind of insect you could think of. Cutting down successful suicides from the cell bars, patching up knife wounds from power feuds and dealing with genuine emergencies supplemented the regular medical and psychiatric workloads. To be a prison nurse you have to be an all round nurse and especially good at recognising the genuine article amongst the time wasters. |
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After five years within those walls, my dormant traveling blood started demanding some kind of fulfillment. I was soon to be on a flight bound for the United States of America. It had taken three months to obtain a work permit and in the latter half of 1989 I landed in one of the lesser known states of America for a minimum of a one year contract. For the next three years I would be working as a Neonatal Intensive Care Nurse in a large children's hospital and became fairly settled in some ways. |
| I wasn’t completely happy though, I didn’t really fit in with the American way of life. I wasn’t ambitious enough. I was content to just be a hands-on nurse and not to aspire to management positions. I had no GOALS, I was subsequently told. The need for career goals seemed to be very important to my managers. To be content to stay where you were in their minds showed a lack of motivation. Needless to say we fell out on more than one occasion and after three years my native UK called me back again. America was a wonderful experience, but not for me. |  |
| After returning to my native land I was invited by a Scottish friend to visit her on an island off the west coast of Scotland. I was to stay there for nearly a year, working in a nursing home for the elderly. Caring for the elderly is a special job. Although I’ve worked in fields of nursing as technical as intensive care, the fulfillment you get from making somebody smile is worth more than anything else. |
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I’ve heard of many nursing homes that I wouldn’t send my cat to, and look upon these profiteers in human misery with disgust. An elderly person isn’t just a pay cheque, they are individual human beings and deserve respect and consideration. Too many times have I seen staff forgetting these basic points, but at least in this nursing home good care was top priority. For once the management an myself saw eye to eye on this issue. |
| It wasn’t anything to do with the nursing home why I finally left Scotland. My desire to travel had been rekindled and I’d decided to head back south to England again. |
| After a week long trip to Amsterdam turned into a circumnavigation of the globe, I suddenly found myself on a train across Russia and Siberia into Outer Mongolia. To view my world travels visit the 'Circumnavigation of the Globe in 800 Days' section of this website by returning to the index page. |
| During the five days I spent on the Trans-Siberian Express train from Moscow to Ulan-Bator, one of the other western passengers had a copy of 'The Economist'. One article indicated a famine in central Mongolia and the shortage of medical aid there. I was on a train to Mongolia and was due to arrive there in the next few days. My automatic thoughts turned towards volunteering my services with the aid agencies that were active in the country. I felt in some way that I could be of help during the crisis. |
| Shortly after arrival in Ulan-Bator I attempted to track down the voluntary aid organisations to offer my services. I was a qualified nurse in two continents with more than ten years experience in total. I'd expected that the aid organisation would have appreciate my offer. It hadn’t taken long to find the regional coordinator of one of the major international aid organisations, she was obviously staying at the five star hotel in the centre of the city. Annoyed at being disturbed during her a-la-carte meal, I was informed that yes they needed nurses, but that I would have to go back to England, fill out the required forms and maybe in a year or so be sent back. She couldn’t allow my any more of her time because once she’d finished her feast she was flying to Beijing for the weekend to attend a conference of aid organisers. Unexpectedly bureacuracy featured higher than need in these circumstances. |
| The only other relief organisation in town was the American Peace Corps. I gave them a try as well but even though I had an American nursing licence, I wasn’t an American citizen. So despite being short of nurses, they couldn’t take me on either. Once again red tape had strangled my efforts to be of assistance and without transport to the far reaches of the country, I had to abandon the idea of joining the relief program. |
| After traveling through China I finally arrived in the British colony of Hong Kong. This was to be my financial replenishment point. I’d left England without the intention of traveling such a long distance and only the relative inexpensiveness of third world travel had allowed my funds to last thus far. |
| For the first six months of my stay in Hong Kong I worked for a nursing agency. Most of the time I was assigned work in the intensive care unit of one of the private hospitals on The Peak. Cardiovascular surgery and neurosurgery were the predominant fields and the patients would be primarily colonials. The Chinese population had their own hospitals but a knowledge of Cantonese was necessary to work there. Freelance nursing is a game of chance though, you never know if any work is going to be available. After six months the workload dried up and I started working in a different job outside of the profession. |
| Although not officially allowed to work in Australia, I did have cause to practice my first-aid skills on a driver who inadvertently took a flying leap through his windscreen in the middle of the outback. I'd purchased a car in Darwin and was driving towards Uluru (Ayres Rock) when I happened upon the scene of an accident. A pick-up truck had lost one of its front wheels and when the axle dug into the tarmac, the driver had been thrown through the windscreen and bounced 100 yards along the road. Another car had already stopped but there wasn't anybody with any medical knowledge with that party. We were two hundred miles from the nearest town and ten from the nearest telephone, situated at the roadhouse we'd recently passed. |
| Trying to nurse a semi-conscious patient with a possible fractured skull would be difficult under any circumstances but in the middle of the outback in the searing heat it's practically impossible. I’d sent one of the non medically trained drivers to the roadhouse and they’d returned saying that help was on the way. Help on the way can mean many different things and my expectation was that the legendary flying doctor would arrive in an hour or so. The nearest base would be Alice Springs and that was two hundred miles away. Allowing for despatch time and an airspeed of between 100-200mph, one to two hour was a pretty reasonable expectation. |
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Over three hours had passed, there was still no sign of medical assistance and my patient’s condition was deteriorating fast. We were having trouble keeping the ants out of his leg wounds and it was starting to rain. The umbrellas we'd previously been using as parasols were now performing their designed function as the rain started to drizzle down. |
| At the four hour point a police truck arrived. He’d been sent to assess the situation before Alice Springs hospital made a decision on whether to send an ambulance or the flying doctor. He would also provide a radio link to the hospital and relay information on the patient’s medical state. No medical assistance had yet been sent and already over four hours had elapsed since the accident. |
| After an hour of relaying information to the hospital via the police officer I asked if the flying doctor was on the way yet. I was surprised to be told that Alice Springs hospital were still evaluating the situation and deciding whether to send an aircraft or an ambulance. I eventually had to use the police radio myself, informing them of my qualifications and my assessment of the severity of the patient’s condition, before they finally agreed to send any medical help. By the time the flying doctor arrived it had been nearly seven hours since the accident and an ambulance could have been there in four if it had been dispatched immediately. So much for the world famous outback medicine. |
| Don’t misunderstand where I lay the responsibility for the handling of this incident. The flying doctor service was very prompt and efficient once they’d been sent. Unfortunately it isn’t much good having a superb service if it takes the hospital five hour to decide who to send. |
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After returning to the U.K. via New Zealand and the United States of America, I’d taken a break from nursing and undertaken some jobs in other fields. It wasn’t until a friend in the Channel Islands asked me to stay for a week that I returned to the profession. Nine months of nursing on an island only fifteen miles long and eight miles wide sent me completely stir crazy. Lack of stimulation at work didn’t help the situation much either. A hospital on an island has to cater for the worst possible situation and is designed to allow for that. For an isolated community it has to be that way. |
| With so many staff on the wards and so little to do, inventing new paperwork had become a local pastime. This red tape jungle situated in a remote corner of the British Isles was like the Amazon basin, even a machete couldn’t cut through it. Writing virtual novels in the patient’s nursing reports had become an art form in itself and the nurses could quote you hundreds of different research modules. |
| My priority of ensuring the patients had water to drink and everything else they physically needed conflicted with the norm. I wasn’t completing enough paperwork in preference to patient care, and I knew it. Nursing in Britain had changed but to the contrary my nursing ideals hadn’t. I was becoming very disillusioned with modern nursing priorities. |
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Returning to London the long way, via the rest of Europe, I found myself a position on the bank of a private hospital close to London’s famous Harley Street. I was working with mainly Arabic and Greek patients who’d suffered head injuries. Their slow process of rehabilitation was well catered for in this high quality hospital. Intense physiotherapy, occupational therapy and associated services, ensured a marked improvement in their conditions. With the embassy paying the bill no expense was to be spared for the lucky few with diplomatic contacts at home. |
| My reason for leaving this position had nothing to do with the quality of the hospital or the care they provided. Everything was well above standard and the care was first class. My disagreement was about a patient partaking in the smoking of a certain unauthorised organic substances. The doctor was willing to give his verbal permission but it would be the nurse who took the blame if anything went wrong. I decided to move on rather than risk becoming the 'fall person' if anything ever hit the fan. |
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I returned back to the intensive care field of nursing again, but this time in London as a freelance agency nurse. The bonus of freelance work is that you don't have to get involved with the politics of a hospital and that aspect of the job appealed to me. |
| I was devoting a large proportion of my time to my writing comedy novels but still had to nurse to pay the bills. For 2-3 nights a week I put down my pen and headed for any hospital in London that needs an intensive care nurse. The hyper-bureaucracy of modern nursing hadn’t reached the sphere of intensive care yet. In this field a nurse still had responsibility for the total care of her patient. Paperwork was secondary to patient care, the right place for it. Yes we need paperwork but when it takes over, that’s when we have a problem. I was relatively happy plodding along through life under these circumstances and remained there for a few years. |
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After a two week visit to a friend in Sunderland I quickly decided that the friendliness and hospitality of the people up in the North East of England was my kind of society. The north/south divide does exist in my opinion, the north being a much more pleasant place to live. With a desperate shortage of nurses in the NHS I soon myself a position on the bank at the main city hospital. I could have taken a full time job but the bank allowed me to avoid any hospital politics. |
| As a Flexibank nurse I spent the last few years working on all the different wards in the hospital, ranging from critical care units to care of the elderly wards. Variety being the spice of my life, this has more than sustained my zest for life until now. But with my obvious wanderlust, who knows where I'll be tomorrow. My feet are starting to itch already and I know that feeling well. |
GETTING INTENSE ONCE AGAIN
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After the Flexibank started to be wound down in order to save money for an NHS Trust balancing the books, it became necessary to either move along the road or get a proper job once again. The freedom of just working occasional nights was going to be history. It was with perfect timing that I jumped from the sinking Flexibank ship just before it sunk. Where I landed was in the Integrated Critical Care Unit. Once again I was at the sharp end of nursing and working with a great team of dedicated staff. I must be getting old, because this is the longest I've stayed in one place. (Or maybe it's just great to live in the North). |
THE LAST INDIGNITY, AND THE LAST STRAW
| The Final Indignity Of The New NHS
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Mrs. S - A Patient Too Far
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| THE END |
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