FOR once with my metaphorical tongue firmly in its central position, may I say that few letters you have printed over the years have impressed me, with respect to both content and style, more than “On-the-job training rather than degrees for nurses” from Alison Parkinson on May 26, which time after time hits the nail smack on the head.

What indeed is the use of a “graduate” nurse who considers providing, let alone collecting, bedpans beneath her – or him, I suppose we should add – and may even be unfamiliar with the object and its purpose to start with.

The only potential paradox is that the correspondent herself would probably have sailed through university as well as apparently excelling at the practical aspect, as would some others.

As for the question of provenance of all the “extra” GPs required to offer the seven-day-week service proposed at a time when fewer are entering the specific profession and more planning to hang up their boots prematurely, the inevitable response, unless we are swiftly visited by benevolent extraterrestrials, is from overseas, with all the clinical, ethical, cultural and linguistic risks previously discussed, or out of traditional retirement, at a time when there seems to be at least one medical “breakthrough” every day and various forms of technology are “progressing” at a mind-boggling, ever-accelerating rate which even many a younger, otherwise competent physician finds challenging.

As an excellent, now sadly departing, health centre nurse pointed out, clinicians are supposed to spend most of the consultation period looking at the patient, not a computer screen.

DAVID DIMENT
Riverside Court
Oxford