Brilliant, devastating, heartbreaking and utterly, utterly true description by Harriet Sergeant in Saturday’s Telegraph of the moral and professional implosion of nursing. She describes the effects of a catastrophic philosophy that has simply driven caring, kindness and common sense out of nurse training. Here’s a sample passage that made me sick with recognition:

‘…a second-year nurse was taking care of six patients, unsupervised by a senior nurse. An old man wearing an oxygen mask was sitting in bed, staring disconsolately at a wash bowl. Next to the wash bowl lay his breakfast, uneaten, and beside that, an overflowing sputum pot. A full bottle of urine dangled beneath the bed. The nurse had left him with the wash bowl “to do what he could”. No one had taught the nurse that she should clear everything away first, remove the urine bottle and then present the bowl of water. No one had taught her the purpose of nursing: to do for the sick what they cannot do for themselves’.

As Sergeant relates, politically correct theory has driven out of nurse training the practicalities of nursing:

‘At a London A&E department, a staff nurse who had recently qualified complained to me that her training had not prepared her at all. In 18 months of study, she had spent only one and a half hours learning how to take blood pressure and a patient’s temperature. On the other hand, a whole afternoon had been devoted to poverty in Russia…The staff nurse had been astonished to discover how little anatomy or physiology her course contained. Anxious that her grasp of these essential subjects was “not as good as it could be”, she approached her tutors. But they took a relaxed view. Soon, she discovered that her ignorance did not matter. Her first exam, tackled after 18 months, was multiple-choice; her final exam, at the end of two and a half years, allowed her to answer three out of six questions, and so avoid revealing her ignorance. For assignments, her tutors had set her work on social issues and ethics - including patient rights. That patients might have a right to a person qualified in how to look after them did not seem to have occurred to her teachers. She said: “Theoretically, you could go through the whole three years without anyone asking you about bed sores.” ‘

The results are as predictable as they are distressing. ‘A consultant anaesthetist at a London teaching hospital complained of patients arriving for operations with bed sores. On ward rounds, he frequently found himself helping patients to eat. “The catering staff slam the food down. No one bothers. Spooning food into a patient is just too demeaning for professional nurses, it seems. I always thought nurses were meant to care for patients. I might be wrong. I may have missed the plot somewhere.'’ Another described the difficulty of trying to find a particular patient on a ward. Every patient is supposed to have his name above the bed. But, in some hospitals, they refuse to display the name “in case it infringes your autonomy”. So the consultant found himself wandering around, trying to find his patient. “There never seems to be anyone in charge who knows anything,” he said.He would try to find the patient’s nurse. Then the patient’s notes. “I don’t often strike lucky with all three.” Finally, he had to translate the nurses’ diagnoses. “They refuse to use hierarchical, male-dominated medical terms, so they will not say the patient is unconscious. No, the patient has to have ‘an altered state of awareness’.'’ ‘

There are many other distressing examples in this piece, extracted from a pamphlet to be published next week by the Centre for Policy Studies. Of course, these experiences are not universal. If you are youngish and articulate, or if you are in an intensive care unit full of the highest-tech whizzbangerama, you may well have quite an agreeable nursing experience. But if you are old, inarticulate or worse, it’s a different story.

The source of the rot is a feminist orthodoxy which says nurses must no longer be the ‘handmaidens’ of male chauvinist doctors but instead must be their equals. ‘Caring’, therefore, can have no place any more in nursing since it demeans the nurse. Making sure the very old and incompetent actually eat, or making them comfortable in bed, or helping them wash or dress in a way that maintains their dignity, are all beneath too many modern nurses. Wicked stuff; and nothing short of a collapse in the moral heart of nursing itself.