Opinion  

Unfortunately they have also become conflated so that, for many people, being an entrepreneur means running your own social enterprise. This leads to a polarisation in which entrepreneurs are visible, exciting, achieving people, feted by the DoH, visited by ministers and generally the professional celebrities du jour - and the rest of us feel like boring underachievers.

Hard on the heels of such polarisation, inevitably, comes prejudice. So we sneer at the entrepreneurs, cast doubt on their motives, actions and achievements, and maybe even secretly hope that they don't do quite as well as they might.

Maybe it is time to reclaim the label of enterprise for the many things it used to mean. It is enterprising to find a new way of doing an old task; to spot an opportunity to improve a process, and do it; to go imaginatively around a problem instead of sitting gloomily in front of it, stymied.

If such actions sound ordinary and familiar, that is because most nurses are used to being enterprising in these ways. Seventeen years of the QNI awards programme has shown us that, no matter how challenging the circumstances, how stretched the finances or how gloomy the NHS mood, there are always nurses and midwives in primary care applying for project funds because they have ideas for improving care and they want to do something about it. They are being enterprising - firstly in having the idea, and secondly in looking for funding to put it into practice.

Even these everyday entrepreneurs have their problems with others, though. If their managers, colleagues and peers were asked about to describe them, they would probably come up with the usual words: innovative, independent, thinks outside the box. Pressed further, they might also admit that they find them difficult, demanding, challenging or awkward. Even enterprise on an everyday scale can set up antibodies in others.

So a useful daily resolution for all of us would be to 'be nice to an entrepreneur'. They are, after all, only trying to make things better.

- Rosemary Cook, director, Queen's Nursing Institute

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