Don't you hate people who think they're just too good for certain things?
AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – A union representing Dutch nurses will launch a national campaign Friday against demands for sexual services by patients who claim it should be part of their standard care.If pornography has taught me anything it's that sexual favors are standard procedure at all hospitals, especially in Eastern Europe and Asia. And those other less aloof nurses deserve both raises and medals for doing God's work here on Earth. I hear through my super-secret liberal sources that President Obama is trying to work a similar "Handjobs for Health" provision into the current health care reform bill as yet one more attempt to destroy the moral fabric of American society. You're going down, moral fabric!
The union, NU'91, is calling the campaign "I Draw The Line Here," with an advert that features a young woman covering her face with crossed hands.
The union said in a statement Thursday that the campaign follows a complaint it had received in the last week from a 24-year-old woman who said a 42-year-old disabled man asked her to provide sexual services as part of his care at home.The young woman witnessed some of the man's other nurses offering him sexual gratification, the union said. When she refused to do the same, he tried to dismiss her on the grounds that she was unfit to provide care.
(hat tip: one L bill)
9 comments:
I appreciate you are having a laugh here but if I may offer an observation.
In between explosive diarrhea, chronic incontinence, endless amounts of spew, blood, pus, and every other possible excretion, nurses do encounter the male sexual urge unplugged by the effect of drugs from their normal restraint of personality and awareness.
My wife is a nurse and has had a patient attempt to molest her on night shift.
She fended him off and I do appreciate that he was out of his mind from the combined effects of certain medication and that he wouldn't have done that normally. Otherwise I would have battled the temptation to take the 10 minute trip to the hospital and rip him limb from bloody limb.
As much as I feel sorry for anyone disabled and unable to get sex in the socially acceptable modes you and I take for granted, there is a profession called prostitution and it has no cross-over with nursing. Carpenters don't fix cars. Said Dutch bloke needs to grasp that concept and get someone else to grasp his issue. Last time I heard disabled people were perfectly capable of forming normal relationships too.
While other professions get paid gazillions for moving money around or getting their photograph taken in some stupid dress, nurses are keeping people alive and out of pain around the clock. They do deserve respect.
Plus I have seen in fair bit of hospitals in one particular part of Asia, and got the day's events described in detail to me by my missus every night over rice and miso, and I think it probable that pornography is misinforming people.
Totally and merely having a laugh, magpie. I'm laughing at the guy who thinks that his nurse should be a prostitute more than anything else but perhaps my sense of humor is a bit too dry to have conveyed that.
I have nothing but the utmost respect for nurses, they are the backbone and spirit of any successful hospital. My own beloved momma is an RN herself (neonatal, so she doesn't get hit on by her patients very much) and she's one of the greatest ladies I've ever known, and I'm sure that you'd say the same of Samurai Girl.
I meant no disrespect towards your wife or anyone else in the nursing profession and I hope that you did not interpret my joking manner to mean such.
No I knew you were having a joke JBW.
I was just having a rant to the effect that the professions of life and death are often the ones most underpaid.
I'll second that emotion magpie, whilst adding that educators are embarrassingly underpaid as well. This is one reason I can't stand it when the political right denigrates teachers' unions and vilifies college profs. I don't know how bad it is down under but I feel that the U.S. has a dangerous strain of anti-intellectualism about it, and the fact that most medical professionals are similarly underpaid denotes a real lack of national priorities here.
I infer that you're asking me if there is anti-intellectualism here in Oz.
The answer is "sort of...", but it's not dangerous or even obvious, and it is not of the same character as you have it. Most importantly, it's not political, or really even about education, which we take very seriously.
Yours relates to the degree to which religious fundamentalism still holds sway over the psyche of much of America, and attitudes that oddly (to us) seem to venerate authority but despise government (we, on the other hand, despise authority and feel the government belongs to us).
Ours is more about 'cultural cringe' (a kind of national inferiority complex) and what we call 'tall poppy syndrome' (cutting down people who are seen to be too uppity). It all comes from the convict thing, working class British attitudes, and a century of having to go our way in a world that has had vastly more powerful countries in it.
Getting back to the blog post at hand: this is reform that I can believe in.
As always magpie, I admire and sometimes envy your national character. If I don't make it down under before I'm forty I'll be very disappointed in myself.
I think you're falling into exactly the trap teachers unions want you to. When Republicans criticize them, it's not that they are criticizing all teachers and saying "teachers are the problem." Just like Obama is not denigrating doctors as a whole when he goes after the ones doing un-needed tonsil removal or poorly treating diabetes patients.
Instead, they're pointing out that teachers unions are universally against any sort of performance based pay. Also, a lot of people in teachers unions are not teachers at all, but administrators. The US has an extremely high number of administrators who are well paid and we could honestly do without. But teachers unions protect them as well because they're dues paying members. Even teachers would agree that they have too many administrators breathing down their neck, I know, because my mom is a teacher. What we need are systems that pay good teachers more (the teachers who are underpaid) and bad teachers need to be moved to where they don't do damage.
Also, not that it matters, but Republican voters have a higher percentage of college grads. Democrats are really an electoral block made up out of the very well educated (phd and so forth), the wealthy, and the poor (who tend to have no college education and therefore drag the average down.
Here are some good links so you can get informed :)
http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/01/a_superwoman_for_kenya_but_ame.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_Rhee
^^ Tell me, Michelle Rhee also takes on teachers unions in a pretty adveserial way, is she an anti-intellectual? NO.
To be clear, I actually voted for Obama (b/c of healthcare). But I'm not too hot on his education policy, the simple reality is that as a Democrat he can't afford to piss one of his major funding sources off. And if we don't hold them accountable, then you can be damn sure there won't be real reform.
Verizon, if the attacks from the right focused merely on union practices and pay incentives I'd be less inclined to criticize but when they take the form of attacking "elitism" and "liberal bias" amongst our educators I give them much less tolerance and respect.
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