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Nursing Book Review: Of Sluices and Sisters by Alison Collin

With the recent debate about <a href = “http://www.pronurse.co.uk/topics/1865-should-you-need-to-have-a-degree-to-be-a-nurse/posts” TARGET="_blank">all new nurses needing to take degrees, this book about training to be a nurse in the 1960’s is a timely release.

<a href = “http://www.pronurse.co.uk/education/articles/2214-my-opinion-its-time-we-stopped-knocking-old-school-nurses” TARGET="_blank"> ‘Old school’ nursing skills are either feted as just what all new nurses need or dismissed as completely outdated by the academic skills of subsequent generations of nurses.

Consisting of a selection of anecdotes the reader is taken back to the starched world of Saint Bartholomew’s hospital in 1965. London was being challenged by the swinging sixties, but a student nurse’s uniform was held together by safety pins and everyone (patients included) were in constant fear of the Ward Sisters.

This is a book by nurses for nurses and will entertain anyone who has worked the wards.

Just to be clear, this is not something in the same genre as the memoir writings of Clive James or Spike Milligan. It is a very earnest description peppered with anecdotes from other members of the 1965 set and it holds a certain charm because of this.

The reader is invited into lives of student nurses who formed incredibly strong bonds, not only to each other but to St Barts and the system they trained under. The work was hard, their teachers and mentors strict, and there was little in the way of entertainment when they were not learning or endlessly cleaning the sluice.

However, this rite of passage indelibly marked the author and other contributors and they look back on it with considerable affection.

Experienced nurses will enjoy listening to the tales of learning how to create an attractive tray so food seems more appetising (a skill that the author never got the time to use) or the tricks needed to fraternise with the opposite sex when no men were allowed over the threshold of the nurses accommodation.

New nurses will enjoy the comparison of nursing in the sixties with that of the current government target drives for efficiency. However, many things will ring true with any nurses: the fear of working the night shift with minimal supervision; the sadness when a patient dies and the inventive ways that student nurses have of escaping the watchful eyes of their supervisors . Not to mention the panic you get on the night shift when you realise you have just admitted a transvestite to a female ward and there is no-one around to advise you what to do.

You can buy <a href = “http://rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk/e/cm?t=wwwpronursean-21&o=2&p=8&l=as1&asins=0956293808&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr” TARGET="_blank">Of Sluices and Sisters: Anecdotes of Student Nurses at a London Teaching Hospital by Alison Collin on Amazon and you can contact Alison on the <a href = “http://www.pronurse.co.uk/member/alisoncollin” TARGET="_blank">ProNurse site here.