2012: The year that was

摘要

Is it me or has the past year just flown by? Taking stock of it brings back some horrible memories, particularly around the issue of substandard care in the UK. Over the past year I have written three editorials for nursing journals in Australia, Canada and America concerning care standards, and the response from nurses in those countries reveals that they too are facing massive challenges in their attempts to provide high-quality care with issues around compassion, kindness and caring. A Canadian nurse emailed me after reading the editorial in The Canadian Nurse explaining that Canadian nurses are as beleaguered as those in the UK. She lamented about the standard of elderly care and focused on how best practice previously based on ethical standards now defers to the availability of funding. Interestingly, the Canadian Ombudsperson, just as the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman (2011) (England) has done, produced a 400-page document concerning the care of seniors in British Columbia (Ombudsperson, 2012).