Today 12 May is designated international Nurses Day, commemorating the birthday of the most famous nurse ever, Florence Nightingale. Also this weekend sees the culmination of a campaign to get premiership footballers to donate one day’s pay to a charity supporting nurses who have fallen on difficult times. I have mentioned it before, and have promised to mention it again. Go here to find out more.

Recently nurses have been getting a bit of a hard time, they have kind of lost their gloss, their angel’s wings (not that we actually asked to be called angels). It gets harder and harder to recruit the right kind of young people to become nurses, in today’s world where money rules, people are looking for a different kind of career. Women, always 90% of the workforce want something different from their careers and dare I say it, but today’s youth don’t consider any job for life (even if of course working in health-care was likely to offer such a thing). But there are still people out there doing the most fantastic job, people working at the patient’s bedside trying to deliver the best possible care. There are still people out there who are happy to continue to be ordinary regular nurses and quite rightly there are people out there who have specialised and who have developed knowledge and skills in a particular area of practice. There are nurses like me, who have gone into management and lets not knock that idea, after all when there were no clinicians in management there was criticism that those at the top had no idea of the real world. In my opinion, so long as you remember your roots, remember that the centre of any health service must be the patient (or person for whom an illness or condition needs to be prevented) and you can’t go wrong.

On TV the other day as part of the round up of the career of Tony Blair, a young final year medical student was interviewed. She claimed that the main thing wrong with the NHS today was that there are too many managers and that they are in effect useless. Well maybe there are too many managers, but we aren’t all rubbish. There are some poor nurses, but there are some good ones too, people who today are out there caring for people in hospitals, clinics, peoples homes and in other facilities and to them I say happy nurses day!