Nursing is a matter of caring not of degrees

I FEEL I had to respond to the feature in your newspaper (Yorkshire Post, March 9) about Nurses of the Juliere.

The article made a lot of good points, but I fail to see why a committed nurse needs a university course to teach them how to care for a sick person. I was a nurse all my working life from the age of 16½. I was a nurse because I wanted to help sick people.

The point about the patient not knowing the difference between nurses and auxiliary staff is easy to remedy. Dress the nurses in uniforms they are proud to wear that signify their status. We all worked long hours in busy wards, sometimes 40 bedded long wards but there was always time to talk to the patients and help them.

Nowadays the patients have to fit in a box marked heart, stomach etc. People are all individuals and need to be treated as such.

The mention of sister doing her morning round was good. There seems to be no “handover” at shift change so each charge nurse or sister is getting an up to date report on the patient’s state of health.

My husband was a patient in a large London hospital some years ago and when “asked” how he would like to be addressed he replied “sir” would be all right which caused a lot of laughter.