Comment 23 by VrijVlinder :

@Comment 19 by xmaseveeve : a young man phoned 999 on his mobile phone, from his hospital bed, and said he was dying of thirst and the nurses would not listen to him. The police went to the hospital but were assured by a nurse that the patient was simply confused. An hour and a half later, he died from dehydration.

Link? This sounds like it could be one of those urban legend stories. A reference would be nice.

In this case the police have demonstrated undeserved respect for Nurses. If they had been nuns the same would have happened.

Assuming the story is true, at least from what was described, I don't see how the police could have done anything different. Do you really expect them to over-ride the medical authority of a trained professional who is familiar with the case? In 99% of the cases (and cops get nuisance calls like this from people fairly regularly) to do so would have been terrible and probably endangered the patient, its just that in this unique case (assuming it actually happened) the nurses were negligent.

The police could never imagine a nurse or nun to be neglectful. And even less a doctor.

Maybe in the past nurses and doctors took their job seriously. But it is no longer that way. A patient has to have patient advocates or they do not get the care they deserve.

That is a pretty sweeping generalization and not at all consistent with my experience. In fact I had a somewhat similar experience with my MS meds recently. I get an injection once a week. I'm travelling and for insurance reasons it looked like it was going to cost me thousands of dollars for a few injections. Then even when I acquired the medicine, getting the injections was a problem. Some patients can inject themselves but I can't do it. I tried various approaches to just find a doctor's office that would let me bring in the injections and have a nurse inject me. I tried the doctor of the person I'm staying with first. Then I tried other doctors. None of them would do it and none of them seemed to give a shit about my problem. Then I put a posting on Craig's list for a nurse. The response was overwhelming, everyone wanted to help and the two nurses that I corresponded with in detail both refused payment.

I've also had other experiences with the healthcare industry, both working in a psych hospital (granted that was a long time ago) and various nightmares associated with insurance companies screwing me out of payment for things like MRI's.

Nurses have almost always been overwhelmingly compasionat, capable people. There are bad people in any profession of course but to say that nurses don't take their job seriously for all nurses is not true at all in my experience.

People are fallible no matter what they are and do not deserve, undeserved respect just because of their profession, religion, gender.

Profession is different than religion or gender. You don't have to work to become a man or a Christian. I have respect for a nurse or a teacher. Its not based on any irrational faith its based on my experience that in general they tend to be dedicated overworked underpaid people. Which is not to say I take everything that a nurse or anyone says as beyond challenge.