YES, BUT WHO'S GOING TO WIPE THE BOTTOMS?

I note with sadness that 'I wanna be important' has finally infected the RCN. From here on, disaster is inevitable.

For those of you who may have missed it, it's official: all nurses in future will have degrees. They could be given away free with every issue of the COHSE Magazine for all I care: they might as well be, the ownership of a degree being roughly akin to having an O-level in General Studies forty years ago.

While this is really no more than a tributary of the 100%-will-go-to-Uni insanity, it still leaves me breathless with wonder at how those 'in authority' (and how silly that term sounds in 2009) take decisions like these. As you're on this site and gaping at all the other myopia, an enumeration of the reasons why the idea is daft may seem superfluous. But the strange and dark forces once mentioned to me by Her Majesty visit nby these days, so you never know - they might read them and ponder.

1. It will make all existing nurses resentful, and leave them feeling second-class. (Based on the interviews I heard yesterday, it already has)

2. It will restrict the pool available for recruitment - except that, natch, they'll lower the bar to let more in...and standards will fall, and....(see 4,301 other case histories)

3. It misses the point: the key requirement in nursing alongside practical skills is compassion. If there is a correlation between compassion and IQ (or common sense and IQ) I'm unaware of it - although there is a mountain of data suggesting it's inverse.

4. It will cause friction between nurses and doctors - and, from a legal viewpoint, blur the lines of responsibility in cases of malpractice. Ah, the sound of barristers rubbing their hands in the early morning....

5. It will make straightforward medical students think twice about whether they really want to have uppity folks contradicting them all the time; and it will make others think 'Why bother with all this six years crap when I can just do it the easy way?'

6. Everybody will feel far too superior to wipe bottoms, change sanitary towels, bathe sores and a million other unpleasant jobs that only those with a remarkable (and admirable) sense of vocation can stomach day after day. There will be (as we already see with 'graduates') too many chiefs and hardly any indians.

A clue to the thinking behind this move was uttered on Radio 4 yesterday morning when one of The Sisters (political mind, not Ward) rather snottily pointed out "nurses will no longer be simply the handmaidens of doctors". She pronounced 'doctors' as if the word might be interchangeable with gauleiters. Ah right, so that's the agenda then.

One day - and to be honest, I really don't think it's that far off - commentators will look back at the rigid lunacy of affirmative action, universal degrees, polyclinics, Gay Hate Bills and the rest of delusional Wuttism* and ask how on earth any of us allowed it to happen. Well, I've got my answer and you're reading it.

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