The less trade union involvement, the better the NHS care from nurses – Yorkshire Post letters

The letter from Helen Popplestone ‘Help us change law to tackle shortage of nurses’ (The Yorkshire Post, March 30) is little more than hypocrisy and a membership drive.

Firstly the Royal College of Nursing is not a college but a trade union. The RCN wants public help in recruiting more trade union members to add to the 435,000 it already has out of the 689,000 nurses in the current workforce.

Signing their petition is signing for yet more IT to be introduced into the NHS and for those 689,000 nurses to be moved ever further away from direct contact with their patients. The figure of 40,000 nurse posts unfilled does not represent a shortage of nurses at all. The NHS Long Term Plan is all about modernising.

Patients are more interested in the quality of the human care they receive. The less trade union involvement and IT in that care, the better that care will be.

The most reason cited for staff leaving the NHS is disillusionment with the 
quality of care provided to patients.

I strongly suspect that out of a workforce of 689,000 nurses, the 254,000 non-members of the RCN are doing a far better job of patient care than those 435,000 who are members.