Sir, - Nurses have never been best known for their intelligence, and recent letters from the sisters in white only confirm why this is so. Throughout the dispute, articles emphasised the "inability" of junior doctors to undertake the tasks that the angels of mercy refused to do during their industrial action; the most publicised of these tasks was the administration of chemotherapy. It is not that junior doctors are "incapable" of such work, as was suggested by a particularly resentful nurse in her letter of October 27th. As she said, in the past medical staff did do this task, among a few other jobs that have now become the work of nurses.
Administration of chemotherapy is a fairly simple procedure. Nurses are capable of doing such repetitive, simple tasks; therefore, some nurses are employed solely to carry out certain work such as this.
It's not that junior doctors are incapable of such work, but as they are already working 80 to 120 hours a week, their workload is already far too great. So, if 27,000 nurses decide to walk out, leaving but a sparse number of the ever-helpful angels on the ground, and refuse to do various tasks they are usually employed to do, how can a couple of thousand very overworked junior doctors undertake their work? There are only 168 hours in a week, and even junior doctors need to sleep (every third or fourth night).
Junior doctors, unlike nurses, are not "ten-a-penny". They work longer hours (by far), and exist in far smaller numbers. That is why not all tasks were done when nurses selfishly and mindlessly walked out on patients.
It's all down to simple mathematics; the whole concept is not difficult. But with entry requirements such as a couple of honours in Leaving Cert (compare medical requirements of 570 points - well, it can't be compared, really), mathematics, among everything else, was never a strong point among our nursing colleagues. - Yours, etc.,
Dr B. McLoughlin (junior doctor), Rochestown, Cork.