2012-02-03 @ admin
It was about 10 years ago that nurse education moved to the universities. Perhaps, this is a good time to consider what we think of this move. Inevitably, there were advantages and disadvantages to the ‘old system’ but there is more to it than that. Many of us have clear memories of the preliminary training school, living-in and the greater discipline in those days. These memories are often cherished and for good reason. To appreciate the full depth of change that has taken place we need to look a little further back than 1996, we need to look back to the 1950s and 1960s. This was the heyday of the school of nursing.
The 1967 prospectus for RSCN training at Great Ormond Street (Bendall 1967) talks of candidates who wish to ‘serve’ as nurses in the hospital. However, they worked a fairly civilised 42 hour week and were paid a small salary. In fact there were other benefits that our present students do not have. In 1967 students were cared for, looked-after by the hospital. This is dearly seen in the GOS prospectus where candidates for RSCN training were advised to take a good holiday before commencing the course.
Those students accommodated (most) within the hospital could use the chapel, a library, a lounge, telephone facilities, tennis courts and free coach travel to work. There was a social committee which arranged social events for the nurses. At Booth Hall Hospital (Hargreaves 1987) there were isolation bedrooms for sick nurses, recreation rooms and quiet, waiting and ‘drying’ rooms. Nurses’ health and wellbeing was considered important enough for there to be a swimming pool for their use and night staff could use bedrooms lined with cork to aid their slumber through the daylight hours.
At Yorkhill in 1940, nurses had a bedroom to themselves and the use of a communal sitting room, library, reading room, writing room, recreation room and a dining room (Yorkhill Hospitals Archive 1940). The Yorkhill prospectus produced in the 1950s shows very plush looking accommodation and main lounge. Nurses had a ‘smoking room’, a dining room with tablecloths and the use of a visiting chiropodist (Yorkhill Hospitals Archive 1930).
In 1950, the King’s Fund (King Edward’s Hospital Fund for London 1950) recommended a standard provision for student nurses (Box 1). Where, I wonder, are the visiting chiropodist, the cork lined wails and the tennis courts today? These things paint a rather pleasant picture of cared-for student nurses. This was an institutionalised life, largely cut off from the realities of the outside world but in its own way safe, comfortable and I think, appealing. New students were taken in just as they were, GOS in 1967 required only that they came with a fountain pen, surgical scissors and a blue cardigan. Everything else would be provided for them. All this in a highly structured environment that must have seemed appealing to all but the most self reliant of students.
It is no wonder that these student nurses came to regard the hospital as ‘theirs’ and considered themselves responsible for its welfare and reputation.
I wonder whether our current students are ‘happier’ than were those hard-working and hard-playing RSCN students of the 1960s. I suggest that the 1960s schools of nursing, and the hospitals of which they were an inseparable part, were indeed a rare and colourful treasure.