Don't Slag Off The NHS!

It's true. We've been told to not slag off the NHS anymore because that's now people get the bad impression.

Well sorry folks but it's not the words we say that give that impression. It's a little thing called body language. We heard about it in the first six months of my course and it comes up every so often ever since. Clients, patients, service users (whatever we happen to be calling the people who use our service this week), they notice that we do not have the time to spend with them because we have so much yet to do between notes, drug rounds and inter-disciplinary working. Even if we try to hide it, knowing what it seems to do to the professional relationship, we all know fine well that the sly glance at the watch will incite a response of.... "Aw, look I'm keeping you. You don't need to be hearing about my bowels." When, in fact, we do need to be hearing about Mrs Smith's bowels and Mr Brown's skin problem and how sometimes there is this little stabbing pain just to the right of the shoulder blade.

Accept it. Until there is enough staff (or less patients, for the management who think we already have enough staff) we will never be able to give our full concentration to the patient in front of us. We will constantly be thinking about the next patient, the next task or the list of stupid nonsense that has been handed down from the ivory tower this week.