Last updated 21:23, Thursday, 29 May 2008

BRING back matrons!

Not modern matrons, not even the newly appointed matrons who appear on breakfast TV and look like someone’s favourite aunt, but the old battle-axes who spread terror wherever they went.

I have been having a wonderful time lately listening to my mother’s stories of her past, including nurse training during and just after the war.

What a different world it was.

Last week we heard again that hospitals are still not as clean as they should be.

I notice that some hospitals are even introducing ultra-violet machines.

When nurses wash they can now stick their hands into this machine and see which bits they have missed.

What we really need to do is throw away the machine and go back to the basics.

I truly believe that today’s nurses are overworked and underpaid, but when I heard stories of mum’s training I started to realise that this was nothing new.

From the day she and her colleagues enrolled as student nurses they were on the wards.

There was no time off for study. All that had to be done in their own time.

They worked the wards, attended classes and, at two in the morning, would cram in some study before going back on duty at 6 or 7am.

Their jobs were pretty similar to now. They took temperatures and blood pressure, and blood. They soothed fevered brows and emptied bedpans.

In those days, by the way, there were no sterilising units. The nurses had to sterilise every individual item on their own.

And everything they did was brought into sharp focus with the daily visit of the hospital matron.

Nurses quivered, doctors ran and hid, and even the patients lay to attention when the matron arrived.

Her eagle eyes missed nothing. A wrongly shaped hospital corner meant a whole bed would have to be remade.

Locker tops had to be tidy and clean and woe betide staff if there was any problem eating dinner off the floor.

And, by the way, those gleaming floors had to be cleaned, not by a team of professional cleaners, but by the nurses themselves.

By the time they fitted in a bit of social life, which usually entailed climbing through nurses’ quarters windows after hours, the student nurses of mum’s day could truly claim to be overworked and certainly underpaid.

But let’s face it, things got done. Mum says the matron held sway over everyone.

It was HER hospital and she ran a tight ship. Everyone, administration, doctors, nurses and patients, jumped when she said jump, stopping only long enough to ask how high.

So let’s bring back the matron.

There is a problem, of course, and the problem is not so much that the nurses are overworked today but that nobody today would put up with the conditions under which the nurses of my mother’s era were employed.

Nurses today are still overworked and underpaid, but nothing like their predecessors.

And why should they be? Why should they go back to cleaning wards and doing all the extra things that the nurses of yesteryear had to do?

Why should they fall into bed exhausted only to get up three hours later to prepare for the next shift?

Today’s nurses are professionals and want to be treated as such - and why shouldn’t they?

Maybe the reason we don’t have the old fashioned matrons any more is because today’s young nurses would not put up with it.

Nowadays employees have the right to be treated with respect and dignity and if they are not, they can go to employment tribunals and demand their rights.

Mum tells of a time when a group of very daring young nurses, who found they could not afford their uniform black stockings, paid for out of their paltry wages, decided to ask matron for a pay rise.

After she harangued them about lack of dedication and reminded them that nursing was a vocation, and how privileged they were to be allowed to work, the nurses crept off, heads bowed with shame that they should have dared to sully their profession by mentioning money.

Times have moved on and nurses can’t be skivvies any longer, and we can’t shove little boys up chimneys.

But maybe we have thrown the baby out with the bath water.

Give people good working conditions but make sure there is good work done.

Today’s nurses can’t be expected to also wash floors, but let’s bring back the matron to instil some respect and a bit of pride into a job well done.

And then maybe our hospitals will be cleaner again.