Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
And if they
don't work well together it's the patient who
suffers. Both professions ought to be mature
enough to discuss the problems of the other from
time to time without coming to blows over it.
Our goals are surely the same. Those listed by
Professor Clark are the goals of all health workers,
not just of nurses. Certainly you can't be a good
doctor if you don't consider the whole patient, as
leaders of the medical profession like Lister and
Osler emphasised 100 years ago.
Secondly, I fear that many doctors will not be
happy with either of the suggested "two ways of
looking at nursing." Those who are said to look at
nursing in the first way (which is described as
the more prevalent of the two perspectives) are
accused of believing that nurses do not require an
understanding of why a task is necessary, how it
works, or what its effects will be. But surely
nobody thinks this. Anyone with a grain of sense
wants each member of a team to have as much
understanding as possible of what is being done for
a patient. Why else should nurses have lectures
from specialists explaining the thinking behind
different surgical and medical treatments?
As regards Professor Clark's second way of
looking at nursing, everyone will agree with much
of what she says and with the progress towards an
even better trained, understanding, and skilful
nursing profession. But it seems to me that to
achieve what she would apparently like to see for
all nurses (examining and history taking, thought
processes identical with those used in medicine,
sophisticated cognitive and social skills, and so on)
would mean that every nurse would have to go
through a course of training very similar to that at
medical schools.
We have all known nurses who, had they chosen
to do so, could have sailed through medical school
with flying colours. But there are many othersequally excellent and with equally good skill and
judgment in many circumstances-who would be
the first to agree that they could never compete or
cope at this intellectual level and wouldn't want to.
It doesn't help patients or anyone else to pretend
otherwise. To be blunt, what is at stake here, it
seems to me, is the credibility of those leaders of
the nursing profession who brush reality under the
carpet and talk as if all nurses were broadly the
same in this respect.
THURSTAN B BREWIN
Bray,
Berkshire SL6 2BQ
1 Clark J. Nursing: an intellectual activity. BMJ 1991;303:376-7.
(17 August.)
580
Bury St Edmunds,
Suffolk IP33 I YJ
1 Bird AG, Gore SM, Leigh-Brown AJ, Carter DC. Escape from
collective denial: HIV transniission during surgery. BMJ
1991;303:351-2. (10 August.)
7 SEPTEMBER 1991