Nursing is the new Media Studies

Administering injections is not an academic process. Like construction and policing, nursing is an essential professional and appropriate training is a pre-requisite. Procedures must be mastered and techniques known by rote. 2 year nursing diplomas have always provided that function effectively. Academic degrees develop critical intellect, something I’m sure nurses will appreciate as individuals but which will add nothing to their professional skill.

Melanie Phillips argues that ‘nursing has been in the grasp of an ultra-feminist orthodoxy which regards the essence of nursing as demeaning to women.’ The plan is to furnish nursing with an equivalent status to doctors.

I can’t comment on whether ultra-feminists are responsible for this change because I haven’t a clue who these savage-sounding Amazons are. Besides, this looks more like anti-elitism. The attempt to confer equivalent academic status on vocational professions is now well-established, and former polytechnics award degrees as if they were overstocked. The general practice has little to with feminism and everything to do social engineering – the levelling of society at work.