Ageism in nursing

There is a tendency these days to label people as part of a ‘group’. As shorthand in a sociology student's essay, this may be innocuous. But in other contexts, such a tendency may be at best patronising and at worst misleading. It may even be discriminatory.

So, is there an ‘old community’ or whatever term one might choose? Of course there is not, for the simple reason that it would be impossible to define. That is the problem that faces any attempt to define ‘age’ as something not to discriminate against. Can the law do this? Should it?

It is not easy to form a wholly dependable picture of staffing levels in healthcare. Much depends on the purpose for which the statistics are gathered. One such purpose is to gain an impression of how much an enterprise costs to run. On a national scale, tax-gathering is one such. Another is pension age; with increasing longevity, the growing number of people of pensionable age comes at a cost. One way of reducing or even avoiding this cost is to increase the retirement age.