This is a look at the nursing profession, following a group of nurses - both student and qualified - through a year in a major London teaching hospital. From Casualty to HIV units, from Geriatrics to Psychiatry, this book offers a view of what it means to be a nurse in the 1990s. The student nurses are followed on their training placements, coming to terms with patients who are people rather than textbook case studies. As they move from ward to ward and from specialization to specialization, they need to make choices - whether to become a psychiatric nurse, or to work with children or the elderly, or to work in the community - and the prospect of examinations moves ever closer. For senior nurses the pressures are different. They have to cope with the responsibilities of trying to run a hospital under threat of closure, and deal with new challenges, such as running a ward for patients with AIDS-related diseases.