Elizabeth Joyce: Caring for the sick is only target that matters

"Dunno" was the reply, in between whopping great clacks of gum. "Is it summat to do with the telly?"

Hardly fills you with confidence, does it? Your loved one's lying there desperately ill, you're going out of your mind with worry, and the nurses can't even tell you what the buttons and beeps are on the bed.

Now, let's get one thing straight from the off, this is not an angry, cheap-shot column aimed at the nurses and ward assistants of today.

It isn't spun, it isn't savage, if anything, the whole thing's just terribly sad.

Plain and simple, it's based on my experiences over the last few weeks. Experiences where no one – not patient, relative, nurse nor matron – wins.

I've sat there at the bedside night after night watching all manner of things that are just not good enough. I wish they hadn't happened, I wish I hadn't seen them – believe it or not but I'm not actually in the business of kicking people when they're down – but they did and I did.

I know it's a cliché, I know it's a tired line to trot out, but standards are slipping.

I don't want to see nurses chewing gum, I don't want to hear them chatting about exercise regimes in the middle of a packed ward and then comparing each others' bums, I don't want them to lose the notes, I don't want to watch them flirting with the porters.

I especially don't want to see these things while my relative's mouth is so dry, their lips are cracking. Or they're clinging to the bed rails in pain because their medication is now long overdue.

I wish my family member received faultless care, I wish I could write about staff going above and beyond and everything being hunky-dory but I can't.

In fact, so many things were missed, so many tablets forgotten, so many sick bowls left unemptied, that one of the other patients told my family they'd keep an eye on my relative while we weren't there. Which kind of says it all, don't you think?

But the thing is, when challenged, the nurses and healthcare assistants are not cold or uncaring, they just look terrified, like they've been found out.

Most of them are kids.

Kids who don't know any better because the person who should be teaching them about standards is probably locked in a little grey office somewhere drowning in a sea of spreadsheets and objectives.

The ward I've spent time on proudly displays a poster of its matron: a grown-up; a professional; a woman with an ironed uniform and the solid look of experience.

I haven't seen her once.

And the depressing thing is, I'm sure there's no where else matron would rather be than out on the ward.

Matron wants to do the job she signed up for, the job she's paid to do, namely caring for the sick and vulnerable and making sure her young team are whipped into shape and doing everything they can to keep the patients safe, clean and comfortable.

It's a sorry state of affairs when performance reports come at the cost of Ethel's pillow going unadjusted or John's PJs going unchanged. There's a vacuum of skills and, to my untrained eyes, it seems to be down to a whirlwind of targets, red tape and not enough staff.

I don't have the answers. I wish I did.

I'm proud of the NHS, I think it's a wonderful thing, but I suspect, as with so many organisations these days, it's a case of too many warbling, hot-air-filled middle managers and not enough troops on the ground.

No one wants it this way and yet it is thus.

Like I say, terribly sad.