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A recent report on the British National Health Service claimed that nurses were not being adequately trained in “caring skills”. It makes me wonder if we think we can train everyone in “skills” in order to produce high service standards. Can we, for example, train strategists in “wisdom skills”? Or politicians in “voter understanding skills”? Will happy marriages be assured by training engaged couples in “affection skills” or even maybe “forbearance skills”?

Don’t get me wrong; I am all for training and I am very much in favour of skills. Anyone brought up in post WWII rural England appreciates skills. Crafts are built on skills and, in my youth, formed the foundation of rural commerce. They were the basis for successful apprenticeship schemes.

And that is where I spot the difference between skill and attitude. The apprentice was not only taught a skill, he was introduced to an attitude that is rare today. When my father retired from the Navy after WWII he bought a cottage in Dorset, England. The cottage had a long, thatched roof which had not been re-thatched since it was built almost one hundred years earlier. The average life of a thatched roof is about sixty years.

We employed a local professional thatcher to re-thatch the roof. His name was Alf Tuck – I knew him as Mr Tuck because I was only thirteen at the time. He and I become good friends during the six weeks he took to re-thatch the cottage.  Every summer for the rest of his life Alf Tuck would come, perhaps once every four or five weeks after a sunny day, and sit on the little rise in front of the cottage to admire his handiwork as the sun was setting, casting a beautiful light on it.

We must have had the same conversation many times. I would say “You like your thatch, Mr Tuck?” He would reply “Best job I ever did”. “Does anyone else know that?” I would ask. “”It doesn’t matter whether they do or not,” was his reply, “I know it.” There is no day of my life since then that I have not asked myself about something that I am doing “Does this reach the Alf Tuck standard?”

Mr Tuck didn’t teach me to thatch. He taught me to try to do everything to my own high standard, not the world’s. He showed me an attitude to work that has stayed with me for nearly seventy years. Nursing and looking after people involves many skills, as does mentoring, and these can certainly be trained.

But caring is not a skill, it is an attitude and the behaviour resulting from it is not procedural but thoughtful.