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Comment by markx2 | Hacker News Reader

I qualified as a nurse - Registered Nurse Mental Handicap - RNMH - here in the UK in 1989.

Many of those I cared for needed regular blood tests. Esp those prescribed lithium and other anti-convulsants so that the drug regime was within therapeutic limits.

There is, for example, a patient called John. He needs a blood test. He comes into a room with a person he has never met, to be subjected to something he is unfamilar with and, unsurprisngly, get agitated and refuses.

This happened again and again and again.

We, as a group of nurses say "Hey, let us do the blood sampling, we know the person, we can time it right, we know this person"

This idea was opposed 100% because DOCTORS KNOW BEST.

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That's weird to me, in the US, because I don't know a single doctor that draws blood for tests. And if a doctor ever tried to draw blood from me I would say "No thanks, let the nurse do it". The American equivalent of this is probably "Administration knows best!" Like at my wife's hospital where they said "having all of these part time nurses is difficult on the admin staff and is going to force us to hire a few more people. So the nurses can go full or quit." Well, they all quit, and now the hospital is paying 4x the normal nurse rate for locums.

Doctors get paid a lot less in the UK because the NHS has a monopoly over their employment (I’m oversimplifying but that’s the effect). There’s a lot less incentive to offload routine patient care to nurses but they’ve still got the air of superiority so patients get the worst of both worlds.

They don't have to be part time nurses. Can't they treat other patients in their free time?

I'm not entirely sure what you're asking. In my wife's hospital's case, a lot of the nurses were part time due to family requirements. When the hospital demanded they go full time or quit, they simply quit and went part time at neighboring hospitals. You can't go making unreasonable demands of your employees when the demand for labor is larger than the supply.

The variety of people who comment on HN is truly wonderful.

Surely you've seen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-a2QBfFQeA ?

(Steve Martin — subdural hematoma)

Damn for a second I thought Steve Martin had released a new single called “Subdural Hematoma” and got excited.

(He’s a professional Banjoist!)

Wouldn't that be "Subdural Hemiola"? :-P

(I'm more of a dobro than banjo fan...)

I wonder if effective psychiatric wards are more egalitarian in that way

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