... DS are not supposed to talk to patients, the time spent around them naturally leads to relationships being made - joking with the patients or spending time listening to them. This is acknowledged by nursing staff to be useful and even therapeutic. This example illustrates how these two categories of staff, nurses and DS duties overlap , but in a hospital there are many categories of staff, either working permanently on the wards, or visiting the hospital in a professional capacity ie social workers, health visitors. There appears to be a clear hierarchy of staff in a hospital of doctors, nurses, care assistants and domestic staff (I haven't included the whole myriad of staff this is a very basic example). When looking at their daily routines their jobs overlap. Nurses being trained in more technical areas, having more responsibility in the treatment of patients, care assistants taking on nurses duties. Mackay (1993, p99) ...

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