Institutionalised brutality

Lord Winston must have known he placed a puss among the pigeons when he aired his view, a couple of weeks ago, that nurses from Eastern Europe are putting NHS patients in danger. Citing Romanians in particular, he remarked upon their limited communication skills and told the House of Lords that they had been trained ‘in a completely different way’ from British nurses.

Predictably, since then, there has been a flurry of concern about his first point; it is obviously troubling if medical professionals cannot speak adequate English, and it will continue to be troubling as long as the difference between a microgram and a milligram is a coffin. Nevertheless, learning to speak English is a relatively quick study, especially for the motivated, and it should not be beyond the wit of man to enforce standards of language. His second contention, however, although thus far unaddressed, is rather harder to reconcile.

Romanian nurses are trained in Romanian hospitals — institutions riddled with corruption (families routinely hand over brown envelopes for what they call ‘extras’ and you and I might call basic treatment), and in thrall to authoritarian efficiency. Compassion and humanity are not only surplus to requirements but largely unacceptable; the more brusque one is, the more ‘professional’. Lord knows, we have no shortage of stories of uncaring and unkind nursing in this country —but at least here they make headlines because the consensus declares it wrong. In my experience, no such consensus holds sway in Romania.

For many post-Ceausescu years I was in and out of Romanian hospitals, working with a charity that eschewed the favoured orphanage projects and aimed instead (how naive!) to bring light and warmth to the dark chill of a maimed mainstream society — to which end helping the sick seemed as good a starting point as any.