Joan started training as a nurse cadet in 1966. She tells of her early years as first a Cadet Nurse and then as a Student Nurse, and how she was expected just to do as she was told.
She then became a Staff Nurse and worked in a variety of different places, including A&E, a respite hospital where they had to refer to the patients as clients and weren't even meant to do basic things such as send off a urine sample (!) and in an isolation hospital.
Her first post as a Sister was in a GP practice when the post was new, later becoming a Marie Curie nurse, a prison nurse and working in a centre for women who had been subjected to sexual assults.
All this was interspersed with raising her son, caring for her mother in her last week or so of life and caring for a friend at the end of her life.
Review
Being a nurse myself, I absolutely love these books of previous nurse's experience. I find the change from how we practise today so very different and absolutely fascinating.
At times, I was laughing out loud at the stories in these books. I know what can go wrong in a hospital. Joan has difficulty using the sluice the first time she is expected to use it. I, too, had difficulties when using the sluice once as a student, and whilst I didn't end up soaking a Sister, I did have an HCA having to help me scoop faeces up!
I do however have one major criticsm, and it is of Mrs. Woodcock herself, and not of her book. At the end of the book, she criticises the care that nurses with a degree provide, giving two examples, one that her elderly neighbour was left in a disgusting condition (incontinent with her head in her dinner plate whilst the nurses sat at the nurses station) and the second that a degree level student nurse told some one in a hospice that she didn't do mess. All I have to say is the fact that the neighbour was left in such a terrible condition is not the fault of degree nurses. It may simply be those nurses. Secondly, the fact that just becasue the student nurse was being trained at degree level does not mean that all degree nurses are like that. I am a nurse with a degree and will help clean up all types of bodily fluid. Likewise, I have worked with nurses trained the old fashioned way who do not see it as their job to get their hands dirty.
Whilst I enjoyed the book, the last few pages, criticsing degree nurses, left me fuming.
