I have crossed over to the other side

Before I started medicine, I had always thought that nurses and doctors were a similar species. After all, don't we want the same things-the patients to get better, job satisfaction, and regular coffee breaks? Now I have “crossed over to the other side” I am much more aware of how different the two professions are.

I decided to go into nursing after doing A levels in English literature, history, and politics and being sure that I did not want to spend the next three years dissecting the finer points of Shakespeare. In fact, ever since, I have not read a “proper” book and still dislike broadsheet newspapers.

Nurse training was an interesting but at times frustrating experience. We were guinea pigs for the now obsolete Project 2000 course that was set up with the aim of making the nursing profession more academic. The idea was essentially good- training nurses with a greater theoretical basis on which …