No religion please, we're nurses

We must be the only nation on God's earth where a nurse could be suspended for offering to pray for a patient. Mind you she is a serial offender and was reprimanded only last October when she committed the heinous crime of offering a prayer card to an elderly patient who happily accepted it.

In the latest case the patient mentioned it to another nurse the next day and said she was not offended but some mythical other person might have been which was enough to turn the PC stormtroopers out of the barracks.

In both cases the complaint did not come from the patient concerned but from the mealy mouthed jobsworths who seem to delight in finding the possibility of some sort of slight or offence towards some group or other they have decided to champion - an intervention which has not been asked for and is usually unwanted.

After her first criminal show of compassion the nurse was invited to attend an "equality and diversity course" - a name and an idea which I have always thought sounds like something you would have encountered in Brave New World, or 1984, which were frightening visions of the future.

It always strikes me that the diversity and equality always seems to be a bit one sided but how did we allow the meddling classes, the PC stasi, to turn their pathetic hang-ups into an industry? Look through the job ads for local authorities, public bodies and the like and they are full of ridiculously highly paid non-jobs with community, equality, diversity or some other pc buzz word in the title and a job description in fluent gobbledygook - all with our money!

What should be remembered by North Somerset Primary Care Trust is that hospitals were founded by religious orders, which in England, and Europe, meant nuns and, monks - the Church - while nursing too has its roots in religious orders, which is why senior nurses are still called sister.

Some nurses apparently still take the Florence Nightingale pledge upon their graduation which starts with: "I solemnly pledge myself before God and in the presence of this assembly, to pass my life in purity and to practice my profession faithfully."

Soon put a stop to that sort of subversion!