Categories: uncategorized
Date: 08 June 2004 20:49:18
At the moment at work I have a student nurse observing my work. She's 19, reasonably enthusiastic (unlike many of our students who don't seem to see the point of health visiting or community nursing) and apart from a really irritating habit of changing the subject mid-conversation about every 15-20 seconds I think she's a very sweet girl. From conversations about family I've learnt that she's been pretty sheltered, never had a job, had very little life experience, was brought up in a large-ish city and has lived in London the last two years. In just over a year she will be qualifying and probably end up working in a hospital in a pretty deprived area of south London.
So today's conversation had me almost lost for words. Even granted her sheltered upbringing, it didn't occur to me that the following exchange would seriously happen. I was explaining about a client and mentioned the term "asylum seeker". The conversation then went roughly as follows:
Student: I've heard of asylum seekers, but really don't know what they are.
Me: [basic explanation of what an asylum seeker is]
Student: Oh. Is that the same as those people who go round knocking on doors talking about God? Or is that Jehovah's Witnesses?
Me: No, that's Jehovah's Witnesses. No, they're really not the same thing as asylum seekers at all.
Student: Oh. Right.
I'm really horrified. How can someone who has lived in a city all her life, and been nurse training in inner city London for two years have not even the vaguest conception of asylum seekers? And for that matter, also not have the vaguest conception of basic religions or religious groups? When she qualifies, a significant number of her patients will have spiritual and cultural issues which impact directly on their health and how they access health services and respond to illness, etc. What is going wrong with our education system? When I was doing my nurse training we had sessions on social/cultural issues, as well as religious and spiritual issues, and whilst granted I was a mature student and so had a bit of life experience behind me, those sessions still helped me to learn things and reflect on how I needed to respond to those issues in my clinical practice. How can someone have got through 2/3 of their training and still be so clueless?????
I used to hate it when I was training when really experienced nurses used to slag off the training I was doing as not as good as their training which produced nurses of a lesser quality. For some reason I hate that expression "What goes around comes around", but the irony's not lost on me.