University-trained nurses are not "too posh to wash" says Willis Commission. Of course they are.

From my experience of trying to get young people to help me with the garden, I think they are all too posh to get their hands dirty at all.  From the youngest age they are taught that it's wrong to get dirty.  Their clothes are too nice for them to be allowed to play in the sand.  Hospital nurses are no longer expected to do much personal care for patients.  When it comes to old people who cannot manage to deal with their own bodily functions a very different kind of carer is needed.  He or she is imbued with an understanding and empathy with the elderly, perhaps acquired from their own family experiences, perhaps because they just happen to be born with those particular qualities.

There comes a moment when treatment is no longer useful, or wanted, just to be made comfortable as we await the end.  It is perfectly reasonable to want to be allowed to die when life has lost its pleasures and its meaning.  Why should we be chivvied out of that acceptance?  We need to grow up about death and allow the elderly to express their preference for it.  This is not a feeling of defeat, just a feeling that one's life has come to its end and we need to be cared for by somebody who does not find wiping our bum for us disgusting and does not make us feel terribly lonely by refusing to accept that death is near.  Those people deserve to be paid just as  much as trained nurses.  Of course they never can be.  But their satisfactions come from something deeper than money.