Matron airs her view on Nursing Research at #Sttwitters
@StTweetersTrust
Speaking as an essentially practical nurse, I find the endless discussions about nursing research impossible to bear in silence. Now research is a very good thing in its place, there can be few alive today who have not benefited from the vision and determination of the great men of medical science; where would we be without Listers`antiseptics, Simpsons anaesthesia, or Andrews Liver Salts.
But research is emphatically and undeniably the rightful domain of the doctor, as the sluice is the appropriate area for the student nurse. Those who argue for nursing research are the same quasi-intellectuals who seek to turn this great profession of ours into a mere technical specialism. You will hear them claiming to be establishing an independent body of knowledge unique to nursing; this is arrant enough poppycock on its own, but conceals a far more sinister purpose. Their real aim is to make the simple Art of Nursing incomprehensible to its own most experienced practitioners; these revolutionaries are confident that under the confusion spread by their talk of 'models', 'variables', 'methods', 'frameworks' and so called 'evidence', they will be able to wrest control of the Profession away from its rightful inheritors.
Such is the insidious growth in the research faction that we can no longer open the Nursing Times or Nursing Standard without coming across some impenetrable treatise devoted to abstract and totally irrelevant topics, peppered with American jargon and complex diagrams. Fortunately most nurses are far to sensible to waste their time wading through this rubbish. They instinctively mistrust research because it so often seeks to undercut and discredit methods which have been accepted for over a century.
Thus I exhort my #StTwitters Nurses to reject this new fangled, academic and male driven demand for so called Evidence Based Practice. NO - we must trust in tradition, in tried and tested rituals, in instinct - this the very foundations of what we do as professional nurse. Brush aside these political 'guidance frameworks', competencies, rules and risk assessments. I call upon the upstarts at the NMC to take a stance on this. My girls have no need to Intentionally Round - they Unintentionally Round because that is at the core of their instinctive professionalism as nurses.
These principles I exhort all nurses to adopt. The Welfare of our Patients is at Stake.
