The NHS is a tricky place. Not only do we have to put up with targets, policies, protocols and people who make it their business to stop people getting on with their ordinary jobs of work but we also have people who apparently think nurse bloggers are a bad idea and who decide it is a good idea to out them. The great Mousie or Mouse Thinks has apparently been outted. There are few enough ordinary clinical people blogging and now it looks like there is to be another less. Mousie blogs about life as an Emergency Department sister, she tells us just how meeting the 4 hour target affects her and others like her, she tells us life at the sharp end as it is. She has little time for some of those jobs worth managers we all know and love to hate. I guess this might be what people don’t like, the idea that someone somewhere will tell the truth.
I have posted little lately. As I have mentioned before, when you have a job that few others do, when you could be easily identified by your bosses and by their bosses it makes you cagey. I started this blog to tell people what it was like working for the NHS in post millennium Britain and to be honest it gets increasingly difficult to do just that. The question for me now is should I continue as I am and mainly write about my life in terms of work, with a little bit of general opinion on healthcare policy thrown in with comment about family life or should I get on and change my focus? Should I wait until I am the next mousie? Or should I be proactive and take a new direction. The jury is out for me, but mean while I offer you this.
20 Ways To Keep A Healthy Level Of Insanity
1. At Lunch Time, Sit In Your Parked Car with Sunglasses on and point a Hair Dryer At Passing Cars. See If They Slow Down.
2. Page Yourself Over The Intercom. Don’t Disguise Your Voice.
3. Every Time Someone Asks You to do something, ask If They Want Fries with that.
5. Put Decaf In The Coffee Maker For 3 Weeks. Once everyone has gotten Over Their Caffeine Addictions, Switch to Espresso.
6. In the Memo Field Of All Your Checks, Write ‘For Marijuana’.
7. Finish All Your sentences with ‘In Accordance With the Prophecy’.
9. Skip down the hall Rather than Walk and se e how many looks you get.
10. Order a Diet Water whenever you go out to eat, with a serious face.
11. Specify That Your Drive-through Order Is ‘To Go’.
12. Sing Along At The Opera.
14. Put Mosquito Netting Around Your Work Area and Play tropical Sounds All Day.
15. Five Days In Advance, Tell Your Friends You Can’t Attend Their Party Because You have a headache.
17. When The Money Comes Out The ATM, Scream ‘I Won! I Won!’
18. When Leaving the Zoo, Start Running towards the Parking lot, Yelling ‘Run For Your Lives! They’re Loose!’
19. Tell Your Children Over Dinner, ‘Due To The Economy, We Are Going To Have To Let One Of You Go.’
20 And The Final Way To Keep A Healthy Level Of Insanity .
E-mail this to Someone To Make Them Smile.
It’s Called … THERAPY
Do you have a direct email address I could contact you on, on a slighly-related topic? NHS Choices is developing blogs on specific conditions (asthma, diabetes, pregnancy, depression, arthritis to start with) and I wondered if you might have some contacts who might like to blog about life on the front line (not policy, just day to day stuff).
Cheers
Caspar
I just realised that if someone was paranoid about being outed to their bosses about blogging, they probably wouldn’t just email the Dept of Health to discuss that very subject!
The NHS blog pilot is at http://talk.nhs.uk/ so you can see it’s legitimate. Pregnancy/Maternity will be launched towards the end of June I hope. I’ve got the Independent Midwives Association signed up to promote it amongst their members and emailed all the other professional bodies hoping to get other leads. I hoped that perhaps you or some colleagues might also like to contribute – and know that it’s a perfectly acceptable way to blog about being an NHS maternity nurse without worrying about being told off, given it’s an official NHS platform!
Regards
Caspar
Hi Caspar, will email you this evening about this.
I’ve thought about this (I mean being identified through blog) and generally, I go down the route of not writing a great deal about management and being quite vague about people I work with. I have actually (unintentionally) probably given enough information out for me to be identified by someone in the same field of work as me (as there aren’t too many) and have written with that in mind (namely – I remain anonymous but remain responsible for what I write if I was ‘outted’).
Of course, there’s no doubt it probably makes the content less interesting for readers but it’s a cautious line..
OHHH my.
I already do half of these things at work!!!
I love the looks I get when I skip.