Hereditary title - hereditary stupidity?

One of the few remaining hereditary peers has been gobbing off about nurses at the Royal United Hospital in my adopted city of Bath. The peer in question is Lord Mancroft, a former heroin addict (and also cocaine, alcohol and pills), Old Etonian and so far as I can see a general waste of space and deeply unqualified to be a law maker for any reason other than the fact his dad was one.

The nature of the slur stems from a stay at the RUH for Mancroft in august 2007 and in essence he claims that the nurses were grubby, lazy, drunken and promiscuous. Quite a litany of accusations there so let’s look at this a bit more closely.

First off, I'll declare an interest here in that I know nurses and other staff from the RUH and also know plenty of people who have been treated there. From my own personal experience, they are dedicated, highly trained and maintain excellent standards and personally I believe this claim to be an ill-judged and poorly executed complaint regarding perhaps one or two individual staff, and even then my belief is that it is exaggerated greatly.

So: The 'grubby' claim. Somehow I doubt it - I have never met a nurse or doctor (and there are even a few in my family) who didn't take cleanliness seriously, seriously enough that they would certainly pick up their own colleagues on it if they felt there was a slip in standards, so I very much doubt that Mancroft encountered nurses who were routinely grubby. I would allow that perhaps one individual slipped up once (everyone is human) but to suggest that all the nurses were dirty and unhygienic is a monumental slander.

OK so now onto lazy. Again, I rather doubt that as most medical staff have more to do than they have time to do it in. No specific allegations made, you'll note. I'm pretty sure that this over-privileged oaf wouldn't know a hard days work if it kicked him in the balls so I don't know what qualifies him to make such a criticism.

Drunken and promiscuous. Frankly, neither of these things are any of his business. What a nurse does in his or her private life is of no consequence to the level of care they provide to patients unless they actually arrive at work drunk which is a different kettle of fish. Promiscuity has absolutely nothing to do with care levels whatsoever and to suggest as much is totally disingenuous.

So in short, he has managed to slander every single female nurse in the country (he makes no mention of male nurses at all) and then extended those accusations from nurses to young women in general. His arrogance and piousness is staggering. Granted, we al make mistakes, we all deserve a second chance but that means he of all people should understand that mistakes can be made. To equate a possible experience with one or two individuals to an entire profession and thence to young women in general is not just naive but immensely insulting.

What I would like to know is this: Why did he not make a complaint at the time to hospital administrators, managers or senior clinical staff? If it was so bad, why did he wait six months and then use his peerage as a platform to rant about it? As I said, I can accept that one or two individuals might let their standards slip but if that were the case and they were not being pulled up about it, why on earth did he not make a proper complaint? He claims that he knows the nurses were 'drunken and promiscuous' because they talked to each other about their private lives over patients beds. OK, I would take the point that perhaps it should be pointed out to the nurses in question that the time and place for such conversations is not over the heads of patients but again, a complaint to the ward sister or a doctor would have sufficed.

All I can say is that I hope next time this odious stuck-up tool needs medical attention he goes elsewhere and leaves the nursing staff of this country, 99.99% of whom are hard working, dedicated and highly professional, to care for people who actually appreciate just how lucky we are to have a free healthcare system. Oh, and isn't it about time we got rid of the rest of these inbred hangers-on and had people who actually ahd some idea of what they were talking about making our laws instead of dim-witted former drug addicts? If we wanted the latter, we could simply make Kate Moss, Pete Doherty and Amy Winehouse peers of the realm.