Underlying all the stories was a theme of '...they are just rushed off their feet'. And 'they just can't look after all those patients...' but also: 'they just don't seem to care any more...' No doubt all having some element of truth, but casting sad aspersions on all the ethic of nursing as I knew it when a medical student, and a keen observer of the scene on the other side of the seemingly insurmountable social barrier between us lowly students and even the most junior and untouchable nurse.
I seem to remember our awe of the Ward Sister on our first wards was greater even than that felt towards the Consultant Surgeon. Only very occasionally was a little chink in the armour of nursing apparent when some sense of shared empathy emerged with the most junior of student nurses: occasional offers of a cup of tea, or help with a drip; infrequent and fearfully hurried conversations behind drawn curtains round a patient's bed.
But one thing was absolutely certain: the nursing staff were perfect and a complaint by patients or their relatives was just inconceivable. Patients, and doctors, had complete confidence and trust in them.
When my turn came to be admitted to hospital recently with a particularly awkward carcinoma, my trust in the nursing staff remained complete, despite all the complaints I had heard over the years of General Practice, and helped my patients to deal with. It had never entered my mind that the nurses who were to look after me would be any other than the caring angels I had grown up with as a medical student so many years ago.
One of these angels, of course, so many years ago, I married; and she was worried about leaving me in their care: she had heard even more of patients' stories as my practice nurse, and was loath to leave me in the care of these apparently untrustworthy, non-caring, lazy harridans.
Even the first 24 hours, whilst I was cocooned in Intensive Care, was enough to completely change her mind. The staff rang her to let her know what was going on: they answered her questions before she had even thought of asking them. They made quite certain that she could be entirely confident of their care for her beloved - and not only for me as a medical man, but for all the others in their care as well.
And on the ward, she was completely convinced at once that all would be well. I think it was something of an Anna Karenina revelation: "All happy wards are alike, but an unhappy ward is unhappy after its own fashion..." This was a happy ward. From Sister herself down to the cheery orderly who swept the floor and brought me ice to suck. From the Staff Nurses to the ward juniors and the student nurse. Day staff and night staff. Everyone knew their duty, and nothing was going to stop them carrying it out happily with a 'nothing is too much trouble' attitude prevailing over everything.
It was only much later that I learnt of my wife's change of heart, when I returned for an overnight stay prior to radiotherapy, and delivered a letter from her to the senior Staff Nurse. This bastion of her profession who saw me through some of the early horrors of my recovery; this patient angel who cleared out my tracheostomy tube at all hours of day and night; this unflappable Irish humorist who coped with the indignities of my early diarrhoea ... collapsed in a flurry of tears in my arms when she read the note.
For my wife had written that for the first time in her life, after many years of all the traumas of seeing other relatives in other hospitals, she had been perfectly happy to leave someone she loved in the care of others.
Now that is what nursing means...
Dr Alan G. Gray