Student nurses organise

Right, just got back from school, and long story short, we won! So I am really really happy.

We finished classes around 12:30 and all 12 people stayed behind for the meeting. Unfortunately another class finished at 11:30 and out of the 17 people in that class, only 4 people stayed behind. I think they only got word that there was a meeting, and not much other information, so they didn’t feel motivated to stay behind. But if we had managed to speak to them yesterday they all would have stayed for the meeting (being realistic though, it wasn’t possible to speak to them yesterday). However they all signed a sheet of paper saying they supported the changes we wanted. We then found an empty room to meet in, right next door to the final class of nurses, knowing they finished in half an hour. That location worked extremely well, because everyone from their class joined the meeting through a mixture of agreeing with what we proposed and plain curiosity. I started things off by saying why our class was pissed off, what solution we proposed and what tactics we suggested we used. There followed an hour of lively debate, but of a very focussed nature, there was no disagreement about what the problem was, or the tactics we should use. The main disagreement was about what date we should demand the exam be rescheduled to. It ended with three quarters of the class wanting the exam moved to February and the other quarter wanting it to be moved only a couple weeks. Some one then raised the point about boycotting exams, and asked how many students would state now, that they definitely wouldn’t participate. About two thirds of us raised our hands. This really annoyed one nurse and she rephrased the question, “Who here would take the exam, even if we had all agreed to boycott them?” No one put their hands up, and everyone recognised the importance of point that was made. We then kept discussing dates, but couldn’t come to any agreement that everyone agreed. Finally it was decided that we should all add our names to the 17 signatures already made, turn it into a petition and take it to our ‘boss’. We also recognised that we couldn’t set a date for rescheduling on the petition, because the people who signed before we left hadn’t agreed to any dates. So we wrote our demands (approximately) as follows:

We will not sit our exam on the 25th of November, but will reschedule it to a later date. We will also reschedule our upcoming essay. We do not feel the current scheduling is condusive to our long term learning, but merely to learn for an exam. We feel this will adversely effect the standard of training we receive and lead to more unsafe practice.

We knew our immediate ‘boss’ was on holiday, so we decided to hand in the petition and lay down an ultimatum to the ‘bosses’ boss’. It turned out she wasn’t in, so we ended up going to the next person up, who as well as working in the university, was the chairperson of the exam board. Out of 50 students, 43 were in school today, every single person signed the petition we drew up, 30 attended the meeting after school, and about 20 delivered the petition. We all gathered outside her office, and saw she was having a meeting, because the door was open. We then told her we wanted to speak to her. She tried to fob us with “I’m busy”, “I have a meeting coming up”, “Can I meet up with 3 of you to discuss this?” (to which we said, no, we all want to speak to you) and finally “There isn’t a room large enough for all of us” (we said we were happy to speak to her outside if she wanted more room). She then capitulated, and agreed to find a room and meet us in 5 minutes. We made our demands, she surprisingly, agreed with us, and 10 minutes later we walked out having won. I think it was lucky we dealt with her, because she didn’t know any of us, and was taken by surprise, and if we had dealt with our boss, they would have immediately taken offence, and started threatening us, we would have threatened them, and our chance of winning would have gone down. I am still trying to process the events of the last few hours and make sense of everything that happened, but all I know is we won, and I can’t stop smiling.