Healthcare is a trust that rises above personal beliefs

The main issue with what the two Bankstown Hospital nurses said so brazenly is not at all about Islamophobia; it’s not even specifically about anti-Semitism. It is about healthcare and about certain standards of conduct that we have come to regard as the norm in Australia.

While doctors and healthcare workers do not have a ceremony when we take the Hippocratic oath, which surprises some people, the principles are a keystone of the ethics and the fundamental function of the profession. These nurses have eroded the relationship of trust between patients and health professionals.

The healthcare worker is entrusted with power and the patient is vulnerable. If I am a patient and you are my nurse, I don’t need to know whether you have compassion for the children in Gaza or those in Israel but I do need to know that you are not going to harm me. I need to be able to trust that you will look after me to the best of your ability.

We treat people of different races, different religions, different cultures, different demographics and different values to ours every working hour of every working day. The treatment that all these people get is the same. To think otherwise is horrifying and monstrous. This trust isn’t only inherent to healthcare. I should expect a chef or a waiter to not poison my food. I should expect the Uber driver to deliver me to my planned destination. It’s just that we can all see ourselves in the role of the healthcare worker.

These are not just comments, as senator Fatima Payman and the coalition of Islamic groups’ communique contend. The standards of conduct apply to all healthcare workers.

I can’t imagine a Jewish doctor saying they won’t treat a Muslim patient or not providing the best treatment. Most religions believe that non-adherents to their particular faith will go to hell, but I have never heard of a healthcare worker pointing this out to their hapless patient, much less threatening to personally arrange this.

That a nurse can even fantasise about killing a patient because of their ethnicity, or nationality, or religion, is the stuff of horror movie plots.

Dr Inessa Stinerman, Caulfield South, Vic

It’s inexplicable that a warning letter sent to Health Minister Mark Butler outlining pro-Hamas sentiments posted on social media by fellow health professionals was ignored (“Doctor’s warning on hate ignored”, 19/2). Since October 7, 2023, there seems to be a pattern by the Albanese government to downplay or ignore the growing concern about anti-Semitism spreading throughout Australia.

Does this make the government culpable for the frightening escalation of hostilities towards Jewish Australians? If so, Australia is heading towards a future none of us wishes for our once great tolerant nation.

Lynda Morrison, Bicton, WA

Poor civics knowledge

Your editorial notes concerns about students’ declining knowledge of government and civic issues that may affect their future political participation (“Back to basics in maths, civics”, 19/2). To fix this, civics should be a required part of the school curriculum from a young age so students learn about government, democracy and their rights and responsibilities.

Instead of just using textbooks, lessons should be more interactive, including debates, role-playing activities like mock elections and real-life examples to make learning more engaging.

It’s also important to teach media literacy so students can think critically about news, recognise misinformation and have fact-based discussions.

John Kempler, Rose Bay, NSW

Reports of students’ poor understanding of civics and government surprises me a little.

Perhaps this is the case now, but when my children (now aged late 20s and 30s) were at primary school, they all received in year 7 a very good grounding in these topics. This included a trip to Canberra and an excursion to Parliament House in Brisbane.

I was impressed by their knowledge of the parliamentary and legal systems, which strangely were never taught at my school in London despite it being a stone’s throw from the mother of parliaments.

Roseanne Schneider, Toowoomba, Qld

Trump’s big picture

US President Donald Trump and Vice-President JD Vance are singing from a similar hymn sheet (“Elite’s long march scuttled by hubris and overreach”, 19/2), that in much of the Western world where left-leaning governments were implementing stealth policies from race and gender to electric vehicles and climate via unaccountable and unelected bureaucracies they were actually making democracies weaker and dictatorships stronger.

Despite Paul Kelly’s criticism of Vance’s Munich address, it’s this understanding of the big-picture threats from within that the Vice-President was focused on.

Mandy Macmillan, Singleton, NSW