THE PUBLIC sector is a place of strong opinions. Everyone has a view about the trouble with schools, the decline of law and order or the way hospitals have become hostage to a target culture, whereas, in my day, matron ruled with a rod of iron and woe betide any nurse who didn’t wash the commodes properly.
Sorry. Getting a bit forthright there. Not unlike Rob Harteveldt, a columnist in Nursing Times (Oct 9), whose beef is about unions and their capitulation – as he sees it – over nurses’ pay. “Once again, those who claim to represent us have folded under pressure and accepted an insulting deal with an actual value of 1.9 per cent,” he fumes. “Why are we not storming the gates