TRAINING OF NURSES.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 58, 10 March 1933, Page 9

TRAINING OF NURSES.

A plea for a higher standard of mental character in the nursing profession was made by Miss M. Lambie, Director of Nursing, when speaking at the recent conference of the Nurses' Christian Union in Wellington. Miss Lambie urged that nurses should realise that their patients required a certain amount of moral support. Were it not for the patient, she reminded the nurses, their profession would not exist. She suggested that the Nurses' Christian Union should establish some form of study as an extension of what they were already doing. This could be done in the hospitals among the ward sisters and the senior people who had charge of the younger members of the nursing profession, so that they might, have the opportunity %o study along these lines. Speaking upon the matter of discipline, which affected the young nurses, Miss Lamhie said that the discipline of the nursing profession had been laid down by Miss Florence Nightingale, and it had been founded on three distinct bases: The vocational spirit, which embodied absolute devotion to service; military discipline, for Miss Nightingale had just come from the Crimea and had seen the value of discipline; and unswerving loyalty to the medical profession. A great many girls entered the nursing profession without the necessary vocational spirit, she continued. Many pupil nurses came without any sense of responsibility, and such an organisation as the Christian Union had a very great opportunity if it could help to organise such a course of study as she had suggested among themselves.