The Left Brain and the Crisis in Nursing

One of the features of our times (don't you just hate it when a post begins like that? But bear with me...) is an increasing detachment from reality. It takes many forms - from the growth of pseudosciences like economics, sociology, evolutionary psychology and (God help us) 'management' to the increasing preference for virtual worlds over the real one and for isolation over society, the denial of the physical realities of life and especially death, an increasingly distant, sanitised relationship with nature, and so on and on - the list is endless. One of the manifestations of this flight from reality is all too apparent in the workplace, where a fixation on process and regulation has led to a climate in which, in ever more fields of activity, people are busier than ever, but the actual doing of the job, in the sense of the activity that is supposed to produce the desired outcome, is all but marginal. Nursing is a classic case, and one that can affect us in peculiarly painful, life and death ways. One hears all too often of wards where nurses spend all their time glued to computer screens or in meetings, leaving the actual business of what used to be known as nursing, i.e. looking after patients, to juniors, nursing assistants or short-term agency staff (and I've seen this for myself often enough to know it's not mere anecdotal grumbling). Basics such as cleaning, patients' hygiene and bed care, even feeding - let alone good manners or reassurance and solace - are neglected, while the business of 'nursing' goes on at a level that apparently has little or nothing to do with the actual hands-on care of the patient. And now there's a serious proposal to make nursing a 'graduate profession', thereby divorcing it even further from reality and paving the way for a future when no 'nurses' will actually nurse.
How have we come to this pass? The author of this interesting book suggests a neurological explanation: the left brain - detail-oriented and favouring mechanical systems over living organisms - has become increasingly dominant over the right, the hemisphere that, with its 'breadth, flexibility and generosity', has a better grasp of living reality in all its mess and mutability. Well, he may be right - though I'm inclined to doubt that it's a sufficient explanation - but if he is, that begs the question Why? Why this increasing left-brain dominance? Is there an evolutionary explanation? If there is, it would seem to be one of those evolutionary processes that is, somewhat paradoxically, driving us in the direction of self-destruction - and, in the workplace, away from the common sense and informal exercise of professional judgment that were by no means infallible but at least tended towards getting the job done.
By the way, can anyone answer this one? If you're left-handed, does that mean that your right hemisphere is dominant, and does it have the same nature as the right hemisphere in a right-handed person's brain? If we left-handers are indeed 'right-brained', then clearly it's time we took over the world...