No, that's fine. That's just for your records. She's lovely, though.
Yes, we have concerns in a number of areas. However, as I've been listening to the very interesting comments today, I want to explain that patients have very intense, intimate conversations with nurses in ways that are hard to describe.
I've spent most of my clinical practice over the first 20 years of my career in neurosurgery, spinal cord injuries, brain injuries, many of the kinds of things we've been talking about, and patients and families will often say something to a nurse at three o'clock in the morning in the quiet darkness that they wouldn't say anywhere else. We have many times raised issues on tough things, abortion, treatment decisions, why they are refusing chemo when it could help them.
In the study we've been doing over the last three years, in preparation for the larger review, nurses told us that they feel hamstrung by that, and if there were opportunities, we'd counsel people on the broad range of services in health care, whether we're in a women's clinic or a neurosurgery clinic and so on.
I'm worried that it might be framed as advice that “you should”; it's rather, “Is this something you've thought about?” Very, very often [Technical difficulty—Editor] and people will not raise it for a long time. We want nurses to be protected, so that they can have those conversations about the possibility that it may be in the patient's mind.