EDITORIAL COMMENT

In preparation for reviewing volume 1 of "The Standard", we have been browsing through the last 52 issues.

Quality and quantity of content have varied from week to week, we perhaps more than anyone else are conscious of the shortcomings of the magazine.

However, we are convinced that "The Standard" will continue to have an important role to fill in the life of the hospital.

Are you?

Progress Report on Nurses in Training contd.

Part 5

Consultation with everyone involved in the learning process of each trainee is necessary for the nurse responsible for writing up the assessment. The report should be written in full consultation with the trainee who should be given every opportunity to put her own point of view and should reflect the considered judgement on the trainee's total performance as a nurse, bearing in mind the stage reached in experience and training. It is important that the trainee should know, before the report leaves the ward, exactly what has been written about him or her.

Part 6 gives the essentials of good assessment as understanding:-

a)	oneself as an assessor and one's own standard of nursing.
b)	the difficulties inherent in the assessment of one person by another.
c)	the importance of making every to be objective.
d)	the individuality of each trainee and importance of avoiding comparisons when measuring individual progress.
e)	assessment as part of learning, involving equally the trainee and the assessor.
f)	the assessor's need to know the trainee as a person whom he or she is helping to learn.
g)	how to recognise professional growth and improved nursing skills.

Remembering

a)	that the trainee is a member of the nursing team, with shared responsibility for nursing care. This presents difficulties for both the trainee and the nurse in charge.
b)	that, as the work has to be shared by members of the nursing team, so should responsibility for the trainee's learning be shared.

Thinking of the trainee as

a)	coming to a situation with which the assessor is familiar.
b)	being limited in experience and time to learn
c)	above all, coming to learn.

Also the trainee is in a situation where anxiety is always present.

Part 7 deals with the different view points of the inexperienced learner and the knowledgeable trained nurse.

The trainee may be

a)	nervous about his or her reception by the regular staff in a new situation.

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We regret that part of the recent series "Progress Reports on Nurses in Training" was omitted and here is published the omitted section.

Social Therapy Review

On Wednesday afternoons the weekly shopping trips continue to be a great success. Although many difficulties are incurred, e.g. negotiating the footbridge on Winwick Road, the therapy in travelling by bus and holding their own money is undeniable.

Usually, we catch the 2.20 p.m. bus into Warrington which gives us two hours clear for shopping. Warrington Co-operative Society have proved very helpful towards us in that our ladies and gentlemen are treated like everyone else (which is as it should be) and not like patients. We always find time to call for a cup of tea or coffee and a cake and the pleasure gained from paying for this is quite amazing. It's surprising that not more male wards are taking advantage of this service as I'm sure they would find it extremely beneficial.

There were two cricket matches this week and both were lost. The staff lost against Red Bank and the patients lost against Langho.

As you all know, the sports are on June 17th giving us exactly one week left. As not many entrants have been to training sessions we hope to see them in this last week for a little bit of training - it all helps.

On the Sunday following Sports Day there will be a Charity football match in the hospital grounds against the Swan Hotel. Although a serious match there will be some light relief at halftime in the form of a ladies five-a-side football match. It is for charity so everyone will be most welcome to bring along their families and friends and lets hope the weather won't let us down.

K. Appleton.

ANGLING

No, nothing to do with the sport - just a little carp and cod resulting from the angle at which I looked at two of last week's contributions.

First, David McKendrick's comment on the occasion of the first birthday of The Standard.... And at the beginning it should be clarified that there are no staff on "The Standard" - we are neither The Times nor The Sun.... some of us are members of the Communications Committee and others of us "Press Gangers". The members give up their spare time to work like billio for what they sincerely believe is a good cause....... the Press Gangers those who have had the mechanics of the magazine shoehorned in between other work - i.e. the typists and the female industrial therapy. From my angle it seems that what difficulties have appeared with the mechanics the reporters and the publications committee are not in a position to know - the duplicating machine going beserk, the paper not picking up properly, the last minute articles, causing rush in the female industrial therapy and the straw that almost breaks the camel's back and for which no newspaper staff would stand - the blinkin' awful state and bad writing of some of the contributions, which brings me to

Second, Besley Naylor's Thoughts for the Year. There is a mistake in every paragraph of this article because the language was so involved and the writing so convoluted that the girl who typed it and the girl who checked it didn't know what the dickens he was talking about. Personally, I think he was saying what the young say "Make Love not War". We apologise for the mistakes........ we hate to make them,....... alas - we are but mortal.

Cordelia Naisby

LETTERS TO THE EDITORS

Now that the 52nd Edition of The Standard has passed and all the compliments and patting of backs for special efforts are over, may we remind you there was also another very important piece of paper that week "The Pay-Slip", payment for a job we are all employed to do and an incentive to do that bit extra when required, which is what we and many more like us have done and will go on doing without shouting from the roof-tops.

What about the people who don't receive any of this who really deserve a special thanks for the hours of work done assembling The Standards after they have earned their £1.

How many of The Standard Committee have taken the trouble to see the background work in operation by the patients in Industrial Therapy?

Oh yes! We, the I.T. staff thank them every week especially when they offer to come back early to get them completed on time. What about you doing the same?

L. Knowles and
Female Industrial Therapy Staff.

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Wise words from Wise Men

On Work

"I like work; it fascinates me,
I can sit and look at it for hours."

Jerome K. Jerome.

"It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty to do."

Jerome K. Jerome.

"Who invented work and bound the holiday rejoicing spirit down?".

Charles Lamb.

And Play

"Leisure is a time for doing something useful."

Nathaniel Howe.

"When a man's busy, why leisure,
Strikes him as a wonderful pleasure,
'Faith, and at leisure once is he?
Straightway he wants to be busy."

E. M. Browning.

"He who does not know how to enjoy leisure, makes more of a business of it than there is business in business itself."

Ennius.

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Overseas Holiday for Psychiatric Patients

A party of patients and two charge nurses from Rauceby Hospital, Lincolnshire flew to Majorca for a five day holiday last November. (Nursing Mirror, May 26th, 1972).

The idea for a change in the regular routine of the normal hospital "week away" holiday to the English Resorts came from a patient at the hospital, which gave the staff the incentive to put a new plan of holidays into operation.

The patients, whose ages ranged from 25 years to 67 years, had been in hospital for up to 40 years. 17 were in the party, and of these, 14 were schizophrenic, 2 were manic depressives and 1 was sub-normal. Apart from coach transport to and from Luton Airport, the entire cost of the trip (£20.50 per person) was borne by each individual, and the patients had been saving their money from March.

Details of the trip had been planned by the patients at their group discussions and the success of the venture was such that Rauceby Hospital are now taking a mixed party of 24 long stay patients to Majorca for eight days in late 0ctober.

D. McKendrick.

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Assessment

I would like to express appreciation to the Publications Committee for the excellent precis of the King Edward's Hospital Fund publication 'Assessment' published in the The Standard, Vol. 1 No's 50 and 51.

I received a pre-publication copy of this little blue book and inmediately felt that the contents give long awaited and much needed guidance to all of us concerned in the assessment of progress of nurses in training.

To date nursing officers each have a copy of Assessment and we await delivery of others to be issued to training wards and departments following which opportunity will be given for discussion of the contents.

N. Coppack

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Congratulations to the following Nurses who have been successful in the Intermediate Examination:-

Kathleen M. Barrow
Gerard I. Davin
Wendy Morris
Soopramanien Pillay Narainsamy
Ian D. Presho
Philip G. Rowe
Garry Shaw
Stephen J. Shaw
Eileen Tennant
Ann Thomas.

Welcome to:	Mr. D. Pennington	- Student
	Mr. I. Adair	- Student

 

Farewell to:

T.N.A. M.M.H. Millington

 

Attending Mabel Fletcher Training College for 3 weeks Sister H. Kilshaw.

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