Exchanged Visit by Sal Stevenage

Some years ago my hospital entered into an exchange agreement with another hospital in another country. We would send them a small group of nurses to assess their situation and make recommendations. This team would be away for six weeks. My friend another sister on another ward in our unit was selected to go. She had a whale of a time. Sun, sea, golden beaches, great natural tan, and so on.

The agreement included that 50 of their nurses could come over to the UK and work in our hospital for up to six months. It would take a year to complete this phase of the exchange.

About three months into this phase the rumour mill reported that two of the nurses on this exchanged had been dunked. Dunking is our hospital tradition along with many other hospitals. Dunking still goes on today it not a thing of the past. Its not an initiation that is not every student nurse gets dunked. It tend to be used as a whim to celebrate a birthday, engagement, wedding or most likely a leaving. This is why the two exchange nurses where dunked. The dunkings are 50/50 in uniforms or underwear. Occasional topless and very, very occasionally naked. You usually here of two or three per year. Being a very large one site metropolitan hospital having a nurse staff of over 1,000 plus agency nurses with other paramedical staff it’s a very small number. Admittedly when I training back in the 1980s it seemed more common but that might well be the rose tinted glasses.

After these two exchange nurses had been dunked in just underwear the other exchange nurses left behind seemed to become angry with us. They refused to go into bathrooms, and just generally slowed things up and caused annoyance. After a day and a half of this on my ward I got my exchange nurse in and asked what the problem was. She explained that the dunking of the other two nurses was regarded as an insult in their culture. I explained as best I could our tradition and the fact that it was meant as a compliment that they had really become part of the team. Although still not forgiving she now seemed to understand.

Unfortunately, things on another two wards, one being my friends didn’t resolve so amicably. The nurses refused to work unless they had an apology. You see their culture as a very strong social bond, so the stripping and dunking of the two leavers was as if you’d dunked the lot of them. They felt each one of them deserved an apology. Well the sisters apologised but that wasn’t good enough they felt that each nurse should apologise. Well this caused tension but senior management insisted on the apology because of the amount of money they where getting for this exchange visit.

Our nurses where so incensed by this that a reprisal was inevitable. Rumours started to spread about what would happen to the exchange nurses on their departure. Putting the frighteners on them. Eventually a rumour circulated that two exchange nurses had been stripped naked and dunked one supposedly on my friends ward.

Within another couple of weeks the exchange was coming to and end. The plan was that now the small team of nurses sent out would return and assess what improvements had been made due to their initial report and the exchange. My friend was packing a few days before she was due to go when she slipped on something on the stairs and end up in a cast. The senior nurse asked me if I would step in since everything was arranged and they didn’t want to waste money and it was hoped to do other exchanges. Even though being two sisters down on the unit would be a strain it was felt more important that the exchange went smoothly after the recent incidents which had been officially complained about when the exchanges nurses arrived home. Well given my friends reports of last time I agreed readily.

We where met at the airport and taken to our hotel. Well it was luxurious. It had all the facilities you could imaging. We started our work and the best way to describe the hospital is that it was on power with the best NHS hospitals of the 1980s. It was 2005. The main reason for this was that most of the equipment was ex-NHS 1980 kit reconditioned. New stuff which they had bought as the result of the exchange remained in its box because there where not enough trained nurses in its use. We recommended a training programme and other things to bring the hospital up to a more modern functioning. The nurses who’d been before said that they had already moved 20 years in a year.

The nurses that where with me where all senior staff nurses or sisters. I knew them all very well, well, or at least names and where they worked. But sitting around the pool or laying out on the beach we all son became friends.

A few days before leaving I was sitting in the hospitals lounge when the unofficial head of the local nurses and kind of union representative asked me if I’d ever been dunked. I said that I’d been dunked as a student nurse when I got engaged. She was very curious about the dunkings and I felt somewhat unsure about talking about them for fear that they where trying to collect information to be used against us. Later that day or the next we UK nurses where sat around the pool. It turned out that the staff nurse of the ward where the two nurses where dunked in underwear had been asked the same series of questions. Another sister who was off the unit but not the ward where the other nurse had been dunked stripped had also been challenged.

Our last day of work was to be a Thursday. We would fly home the following Tuesday. It was planned to be a weekend holiday as a reward. It had been arranged that there would be a formal farewell ceremony at the end of the day. Just after lunch two nurses came up to me and said they wanted to show me a project they had been working on. I followed them thinking nothing of it. We walked down to the basement area. I’d been down there many times. It was used as an equipment store and workshop along with the laundry and grubby changing rooms. Which after the first day we did not use.

The staff nurse off the ward where the other nurse had been stripped joined us with another two nurses. She said that they’d told her that they had been sprucing up the changing rooms for us to use next time. That was future exchanges rather than us personally.

The nurses opened the changing room doors and I could sense the presence of others already inside. As I walked through the door I knew what I was in for. The other sister was already there. She was being restrained by two of the local nurses. She was completely naked. Before I could say or do anything extra pairs of hands grabbed me and pulled me in. The same fate happened to the other staff nurse. It did not take long for them to strip me completely naked. The staff nurse put up a good fight but she two was soon naked. We then where pushed through the changing room doors into the corridor, absolutely panic stricken. We where taken about 20 feet down the corridor and pushed through some plastic sheeting doors. On the other side was a deep bath, like you see on TV in players dressing rooms. It was full of very, very cold water as I found out seconds later.

The local stood around laughing and pointing at us. Talking in their own language. They then left and we still very naked and nothing around to cover with walked back to the changing rooms. The changing rooms where empty by that I mean our clothes had gone. We quickly thought what to do and decided the laundry would at least have towels for us to dry ourselves and to wrap around us while we thought what to do next.

We entered the laundry and the two old women on burst out laughing and pointing. We tried to explain that we need them to get someone but unlike the nurses they did not speak any English. We managed a towel and another one to wrap ourselves in.

Upstairs the leaving function had started and people grow impatient at our absence. Being late is another of this countries taboos. After a while the head local person, the official one, asked others in our group where we where. They did not know. Then a senior local nurse whispered something and the head nurse laughed.

“It seems we have learned more than your nursing” she said.

One of our group with one of the local nurses was sent to fetch us. Of course we couldn’t go like that so the local nurse called the head nurse who announced to the room our plight. The location of our clothes was then somehow communicated by the spirits and after a further ten minutes or so we where reunited with them.

It turns out that the nurses had a tradition of their own. The plunge pool. But what had upset them about our tradition wasn’t the doing of the act it was the fact that everyone knew who’d been done by the rumour mill. For a social culture they where very private people about certain things. One was that you would never tell another person that you had been without clothes, that was regarded as being depraved.