Thinly disguised as nurses

Several years ago someone claimed that coffee machines were being designed to look like filing cabinets,- for coffee drinkers thinly disguised to look like office workers.

Last Monday the Guardian reported on the annual conference of the Royal College of Nursing, with an article by John Carvel on the amount of administration required of nurses. The General Secretary of the RCN revealed that from a survey of more than 1,700 of its members nurses were spending on average one fifth of all their time on paperwork, and 88% said that the time on these activities was increasing.

These figures exclude nurses in managerial positions whose functions are mainly administrative.

Nurses complained that they were were required to do clerical duties such as filing, photocopying and ordering supplies. Many said that there was no clerical support, or that it had not increased in pace with the administrative load.

This has remarkable similarities with the police. In both, highly paid professionals are doing routine clerical duties which must reduce their effectiveness in their main and important tasks.

Nurses collectively are devoting over a million hours each week to "paperwork", work which detracts from their prime functions of caring for patients.

All this is at a time when record amounts are being spent on health, when the NHS has just produced a £2 billion pound surplus, and when there are many problems to which nurses could make a vital contribution.

You have to ask whether the Department for Health, including thousands of civil servants, would really be able to organise a "p*** u* in a brewery".