Is my experience of nurses and nursing a uniquely unlucky one?

My personal balance sheet is like this.  On the plus side a friend having cancer treatment in out-patient and in-patient parts of the Norfolk and Norwich has been treated brilliantly.

And then there is the rest.  Helen B, a friend of my parents was mocked and tormented by nurses in Kings Lynn as she was dying, because of her very posh accent. That was about 1985

Neil S, in Addenbrookes, was neglected and disregarded.  He was given none of the help that he needed to eat or drink and his lack of food and dehydration exacerbated the errors which the medics had already made.

My father in Kings’ Lynn Queen Elizabeth Hospital was allowed to wander and broke a hip.  These things can happen, but his treatment by the nurses, for that very painful condition was somewhere between rough and brutal.  He too suffered the fate of being unable to eat or drink without help.  And help was exactly what the nurses did not give him.  Eventually the family had to make sure that somebody was there at each mealtime to be with him and feed him and help him drink.  Without that intervention, his last days would have been a living hell.

Let me know if you have had similar experiences, or indeed happier ones.  We all read of such things, and indeed far worse, in the papers, but when you observe it yourself, it feels far more immediate.

Of course I know that my sample is too small to be statistically meaningful but my feeling is that it is not far from the experience of many, especially when dealing with the less glamorous ends of medicine.

Is it that those nurses who were good at giving care, without being degree material, are the ones who should be doing the job.  If you raise the academic standards too much, do you get people who have no interest in getting their hands dirty?  Are we really to believe that it is all the fault of management?  The nurses that I have known whose vacation was nursing and caring would not for one moment have stood for instructions to allow a patient to pee in his bed or to pass by without helping with food and drink.