If you wanted a snapshot of why so many nurses feel increasingly disconnected from their professional bodies, you could do worse than read the minutes of a recent meeting of senior nursing figures. I am referring to the Fellows meeting of the Royal College of Nursing held on June 18th in London. I have the privilege of being a Fellow, but I was not, thankfully, present at the meeting.
One might imagine that a gathering of some of the most distinguished members of the profession would devote its attention to the crisis engulfing nursing: staff shortages, corridor care, collapsing university departments, declining recruitment, violence against staff, increasing workloads, and the endless haemorrhage of experienced nurses from the profession.
Those matters did eventually appear, but not before a lengthy discussion about climate change. Apparently, climate change is now “the biggest threat” to health. Not waiting lists, corridor care, the inability of patients to see a GP, the chronic shortage of Registered Nurses, the collapse of nursing education or emergency departments where patients spend days on trolleys.
The meeting heard presentations about environmental sustainability, adaptation strategies, maximum workplace temperatures, heat awareness campaigns, global partnerships, urban design, building cooling, the experience of colleagues overseas and the need to imagine “a day in the life of a nurse in 2050” working in a world two degrees warmer than pre-industrial temperatures.
This is simply climate alarmism, demonstrating that nursing leadership had drunk deeply of the climate emergency Kool-Aid. As I write this, I am working in Hong Kong where, notwithstanding the heatwave I left behind in the UK, nurses are working in temperatures many degrees higher than those in which nurses are working back home. I hear no complaints. If the world warms up by two degrees, the UK will still be cooler than Hong Kong is now.
The Royal College of Nursing, presumably under the impression that anyone listens to it, has declared an environmental and health emergency and is developing educational material to teach members about heat awareness. It is also developing a sustainability strategy extending beyond its own business operations into professional nursing practice. Really? Have nurses nothing better to do?
The profession is experiencing perhaps the greatest crisis in its modern history. Hospitals cannot recruit enough staff. Experienced nurses are leaving faster than they can be replaced. Universities are shedding academic posts, and nursing schools are disappearing into giant multidisciplinary faculties where nursing leadership is increasingly absent. Research capacity is being eroded. Students are burdened with debt and many never complete their degrees.
These issues eventually received attention, but the discussion on safe staffing and corridor care addressed problems that confront nurses every day. Those are the kinds of issues that nurses expect to be addressed when they join a professional nursing organisation.
Reading the minutes, however, one is struck by how readily nursing has absorbed the language of modern environmental activism. Nurses are encouraged to influence urban planning, building design, community resilience, international climate policy and global adaptation. Since when did nurses become experts in urban planning, architecture, climate modelling or international environmental diplomacy?
There is, of course, nothing controversial about ensuring hospitals remain cool during heatwaves. But these practical concerns scarcely require nurses to become climate campaigners. Hospitals have always had to prepare for extremes of weather. This is called contingency planning. It is the job of managers, engineers and estate departments working alongside clinical staff.
If the Royal College of Nursing has its way, then the nursing profession should redefine itself as an environmental movement. There appears to be no sense that members might question whether climate activism falls within the remit of a nursing organisation at all.
Many frontline nurses might reasonably ask the Royal College of Nursing: could we fix the staffing crisis first? Could we deal with corridor care? Could we rescue nursing education? Could we stop experienced academics disappearing from the profession?
Professional bodies have finite time, finite money and finite influence. Every hour devoted to sustainability strategies is an hour not devoted to workforce planning. The nursing profession became one of the most trusted professions in society because it concentrated on nursing: looking after patients, advocating safe care, improving education and advancing research. The temptation to embrace every fashionable political cause should be resisted. Nurses have always contributed to public health, but they are not climate scientists, urban planners or environmental lobbyists.
At a time when the nursing profession is fighting for survival, there is something absurd about imagining nurses in 2050 while so many are struggling simply to get through their shifts in 2026. I would suggest a showing of Climate: The Movie at the annual dinner for Fellows of the Royal College of Nursing, but I think my invitation to the dinner may get lost in the post.
Professor Roger Watson is Professor of Nursing at Saint Francis University, Hong Kong. He has a PhD in biochemistry. He writes in a personal capacity.
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Very depressing.
I’m 75 and a retired mental health nurse. When I was working I tried hard to take no notice whatsoever of what the RCN had to say. I wanted to nurse and care for people with terrible mental health problems, and that occupied all of my working hours.
I have mixed feelings about having retired, so I have to make myself remember why I did it. Because it’s ‘challenging’ at times and sometimes requires physical intervention, it’s not an area of work that suits elderly people.
I often wonder why all the climate change fans refuse to dig deeper. Interference in weather via HAARP, DARPA, DEWS, Geoengineering including chem trails seems to be too difficult to fathom. And yet here we are again, like clockwork, with smoke from Canadian fires affecting the air America breathes, in the Midwest and east coast. Growing up in Chgo 75 yrs ago, there were no “fires” in Canada. But now it is an annual event. timed with “hot” weather. I am sure no one would intentionally set fire. Oh wait a minute, maybe they did.
It’s ok, by 2050 the entire “working” population of the NHS will be imported “healthcare” workers from Kenya, Nigeria, India, Sri Lanka or the Philippines. They will be used to working in warmer temperatures and we won’t need universities to train anyone. AI will take up the slack. Problem solved.
The UK is a fundamentalist state beholden to woke ideology.
There is very little difference between how Iran operates and what the UK has become.
In Iran they have the IRGC acting as a watchdog over every institution, every aspect of daily life, ensuring shia Islamoc ideology prevails over everything.
In the UK we have a woke cadre embedded in every major institution, shaping laws and regulations, making sure woke ideology – climate change, LGBT, racism (anti-racism, as they call it) – seeps into everything.
Everything will be degraded more and more as energy is redirected away from competence and ideological outcomes are prioritised.
Co-incidentally a former work colleague of mine in an academic setting was Iranian having fled Iran some years after the revolution where he had been a professor of maths. He descibed the problems of day to day administration as “cloying” in that almost every meeting or decision or funding application had to explain to some government functionary, whether present in the meeting or not, how it related to or supported Islam, Our Glorious Leader, or advanced The Revolution. This left little time to deal with the substantive issues.
Rather like meetings of the Royal College if Nursing. Or any local authority planning meeting.
Too many people telling everyone how to do useless things and not enough people doing useful things.
Not very sustainable, is it.
For example, landlords now have to engage house energy performance inspectors to go round with a clipboard and basic knowledge walls and tick some boxes that the tenant has to sign off before taking up tenancy. Nobody actually adds insulation or mends the hole in the roof.
I had an inspector (with clipboard) in recently, I might rent or sell if I decide to abandon this once great but ultimately doomed nation as it staggers along in a spiral to the bottom. He somehow missed the fact the my hot water tank has 4 inches of factory installed insulation underneath the duvet and aluminium foil insulation that I added, even thought I showed it to him. It makes no difference. The suggested improvements to bring me from a D to a C rating would cost about £25,000 with a payback period of about 30 years. Not exactly an enticing prospect. He told me that the administration requirements and details required from him were increasing all the time. So someone with a large budget, lots of staff to spend it and needing to be recruited, trained and managed, with the related bureaucracy and managers, and administrative overhead is working away adding more and more requirements. Probably called Ed Milliband.
Perhaps it’s a replacement for religion, but it seems to me that everyone and every organisation are now wannabe politicians who see their jobs or the ostensible purpose of their organisation as secondary to pursuing political and ideological objectives.
No perhaps about it. It is an act of devotion for the faithful.
I’m not religious so my understanding may be flawed but it seems me there are two types of religious person (at least in Christianity which is what I’ve mainly come into contact with). There are those for whom it’s a largely personal experience, between them and God, and their focus is getting their own house in order. They may come together with others for spiritual sustenance and they may talk about their faith with non believers when asked, in the spirit of sharing the good that they have found. Then there are those for whom it’s like joining a club or a gang, and they want to see their club or gang become powerful and play a part in shaping society the way they think it should be, to the extent that they are happy for others to be forced to conform to their way of thinking. It’s this second type that seems most common among those who are secularly religious.
That is a pretty good and accurate summary of the state of Christianity, certainly in this country. I hope I belong to the first kind of Christian. I have certainly become ashamed of those who use Christianity to promote secular issues like so-called reparations, net zero, as well as urging people to be jabbed as an act of love for their neighbours. All these are band-wagon issues, which are adopted without critical objective thought, or by looking at all possible sides of an argument. If Christians come to conclusions which I disagree with, fair enough, and there are many platforms for supporting a wide range of views, but pulpits are for proclaiming the Word of God and let each hearer decide as his conscience prompts. Here endeth the lesson.
Again I may be wrong but the second kind don’t seem all that…..Christian.
The big problem we’ve got is inadequate infrastructure provision due to population increases, longer life expectancy and increasing affluence. Successive governments and politicians have failed in their duty to provide this infrastructure, but rather than say “sorry folks, we’ve messed things up”, climate change is their version of dog’s eaten my homework – a transparent excuse for failure.
There’s a social class issue lurking behind this. The medical profession in Britain is part of the state bourgeoisie – the class that lives at the taxpayers’ expense, and which has, since the Second World War, displaced the entrepreneurial middle class as the dominant class. The state bourgeoisie seeks control of its fundamental resource: society as a whole. To this end, in the 1980s the state bourgeoisie adopted “the climate emergency” as the ultimate social-control project. By means of it every aspect of people’s lives can be brought under control, which in essence means that ever more resources can be passed to the state bourgeoisie. (This is the main reason the advocates of the climate emergency are so resistant to free discussion about it.) From this point off view it makes perfect sense for the Royal College of Nursing to concern itself with its profession’s income, and how it might bring its fundamental resource under ever stricter control.