OPEN LETTER TO DR. NYE ( Clinical Champion, Liverpool ME/CFS Clinical Network Co-ordinating Centre), c. 2007

Came across this on Facebook and thought it was worth highlighting, not least for the attitudes it exposes towards ME patients within the NHS.

http://www.sayer.abel.co.uk/MES-Nnye.html

 

The reply appears to be a joke in poor taste by picking on one of the least important aspects of the complaint, the "verbal aggression", which Nye is clearly indicating that the complainant is believed to be displaying.


DIT Believe me, when it comes to jokes in poor taste, I know what I am talking about.

 

Sad to say I am neither shocked nor surprised.

This is exactly what a great many of them really do think, in my experience and opinion.

 

Note that this is from around a decade ago.

 

True, but I think attitudes like this that go unchallenged become entrenched. I doubt they've changed much at all.

Of course, patients aren't qualified to challenge it and the ones that do are just demonstrating that they are the most in need of thought & behaviour modification.

 

Have added the first capture date from the Wayback Machine to the title. I've tried Googling and been unable to find anything else on this.

 

This quote

doesn't match the NHS safety training I received, and that was just for general patients, not even with patients who had the potential to be dangerous.

If it was true, I wonder what the unions thought of it? Why would the service expose staff to that risk if it was real?

 

I suspect the actual purpose of that "job description" was to prime any applicants to approach their future patients with fear, contempt, and distrust.

 

.....and with the "apology" to share a little laugh as the patients are probably too stupid to understand.

 

Oh why so cynical Valentijn?

For people who don't know, part of the safety training in the NHS involved classes in self defence, physical techniques, videos like 'how leaving you scissors/pen/anything in a breast pocket can lead to you being stabbed in the eye' etc.

The idea that an organisation that sent me on a full day course for 'how to lift things' would also let the situation in the job description happen seems a little stretched.

 

Now we know to leave all the heavy lifting to Luther

 

I walked right into that one didn't I?

One of those days were you're stuck in a warm room with no functioning windows, smuggling Opal Fruits to fellow attendees like a schoolkid, the impressive wooden model with plastic spine casting a long shadow on the wall, ah, nostalgia...