The past several years have seen a series of catastrophic failings in health care in the UK, with a great deal of attention from the press, from professional bodies and from patients' and carers' organizations being directed particularly at nursing and nurse education. The Royal College of Nursing significantly understated the situation in their observation that 'Nurse education and the quality of its "product" has recently been the subject of public and professional comment' (RCN 2013), particularly in relation to graduate nurses. Newspaper headlines such as 'Nurse refused to clean up vomit... because she went to university' and 'Nurses told, "you're not too posh to wash a patient"' (both from the UK newspaper The Daily Mail) continue to find their way into national consciousness, despite the conclusion of the Willis Commission on Nurse Education that:The commission found no major shortcomings in nursing education that could be held directly responsible for poor practice or the perceived decline in standards of care. (Willis 2012)
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