Setting out my stall

It's true. The last thirty years of healthcare in the UK have seen such changes, at such speed, as to make healthcare today almost unrecognisable from that of the late '70s. Gone are the well scrubbed Nightingale wards, the frilly caps and the deference to doctor. Gone are the convalescent patients pushing the tea trolley round, the weekend cleaning rota and the orange rubber enema tubing. But whilst many lament their passing (well, perhaps not the enema tubing), it is wrong to look back with rose tinted glasses, especially when most of us who were (almost) there now have the kind of middle-aged long vision that requires a level of clarity and detail that only clear glass (preferably with some magnification) can give. The trouble with rose tinted glass is that it has a habit of obscuring the finer detail of the picture, as indeed does the passage of time. That being the case, now, in this my 30th year of being a qualified nurse, seems a good time to tell my version of events, before time, memory and eyesight fail to do them justice.

So why bother? Because, I believe this period of time will come to be seen as a hugely  important one in the development of UK nursing history. The pace of change, the economic pressure, the public's expectations, the (constant) political interference, the nursing shortages and the relentless advance of medical science are all contributing to a pressure cooker environment in healthcare and I am not alone in fearing the periodic blasts of steam we have seen escaping in recent years (witness Francis, Berwick, Keogh) are only scorching portents of things to come.

Whatever happens in the next few decades, it will be important to understand why, to make sense of it and to learn from it. What I want to do is glance over the shoulder of the profession to an earlier time when the pace was altogether different. In other words, get some perspective on where the profession was in-order to understand where it is now. Perhaps through the re-telling of my story (and the stories of others) I can do something toward defining the healthcare landscape which moulded my generation of nurses and those that came afterwards. After all, we are the ones who have seen nursing rudely shunted into the 21st century and it is we (in education, research and practice) who have to take responsibility for safely navigating the profession through what in my opinion is the most difficult time it has ever experienced.

I'm sure somebody famous has already said that the answers to the future lie in the past, so my first recollection, to be posted in a few days, starts way back in the day, just as the last patient pushed tea trolley rattles off into the rose tinted sunset.