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Should nurses be allowed to drink water at the nurses’ station? The debate has come to a head.
Nursing Standard. 36, 9, 12-12. doi: 10.7748/ns.36.9.12.s8
Published: 01 September 2021
Even England’s chief nursing officer has become involved in this storm – not in a teacup but in a bottle. Especially during the all-too-brief heatwave in July, it seems some nurses were prevented from having their water bottles to hand and this caused a ruckus. We have to drink enough, they argue perfectly reasonably, to be able to do our jobs.
Adequate hydration is a no-brainer – of course we should all be able to have a drink when we are thirsty. But is this argument about hydration or something else entirely? As far as I can see it has nothing to do with the right to adequate fluids. It was drummed into us, the baby-boom generation, that swigging from a bottle is bad manners and that it is unprofessional for nurses – or any staff – to eat and drink in front of patients.
When a senior nurse removes a water bottle from the nurses’ station, you are not witnessing an act of inhumanity but a clash of cultures.
The water bottle trend started about 20 years ago, when the influencers of the day began carrying them around at all times. Many followed suit, NHS staff included, but it passed by many of my peers, who wouldn’t drink from anything left on a germ-ridden nurses’ station anyway.
Even in the uber-authoritarian days of our training, no one was stopped from trotting into the ward kitchen for a glass of water. And surely no one would be prevented from doing that now? Or from keeping their own water bottle somewhere accessible but more discreet, away from the chaos of a clinical area.
Let’s not blow this issue out of proportion. It is not a matter of being petty-minded. It is a case of behaving differently at work than you would at home.
