http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/02/03/nislam403.xml&CMP=ILC-mostviewedbox Lovely. Remind me to request no Muslim doctors or nurses if I'm ever undergoing surgery in Britain....oh wait, that would make me a racist hatemonger.
I thought I read somewhere that this 'story' is mostly the Telegraph making a mountain out of a molehill; we're talking about a vocal but tiny minority of religiuos nutjobs, as oppposed to the thousands and thousands of Muslims in the British health care system you never hear about. Also, the nursing home my wife works at was having a problem for awhile with some their African nurses who were also evangelical Christians who received their training at church-operated schools in their home countries--many of them failed to give any pain narcotics to patients even though they had doctor's orders; they didn't want the patients to be "addicts." So you had some elderly people suffering needlessly because Jesus didn't want them to get high. Cuts both ways.
Then you have the doctors who are afraid to write for adequate pain med. I see - on a daily basis - people coming into the hospital with chronic intractable pain. At home they take enough narctoics to probably kill you and me but upon admission some dumbass intern writes for tylenol. Happened last night. It will happen again tonite. RN's not administering pain med is a huge problem as well in my opinion. Again, something I see every single shift I work. In my experience there definitely is a pattern to who does not give the meds. So combine this intern with this RN and you have disaster for a suffering patient. It's awful. But be assurred that there are those of us who bark and bark loudly all the way up the tree even if it means waking up an attending physician at 3 am for what our patients need and deserve. Oh and btw, if it's true about those medical students who don't want to scrub in properly then they ought to get their butts kicked out of their programs. Longer gloves would help in exactly zero ways.