THE TRAINING OF NURSES.

Press, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20469, 12 February 1932, Page 4

THE TRAINING OF NURSES.

j PROFESSION CROWDED. LESS ILLNESS AMONG THE COMMUNITY. (press association t*i*egram.) February 11. A suggestion that institutions acting as training schools should retain their fourth-year nurses for a longer period, and supplement the ranks of nurses in training by a smaller number than otherwise would be the case, was made today by Dr. M. H. Watt, Director-Gen-eral of Health, when presenting certificates to nurses at Wellington Public Hospital. "Unfortunately the nursing profession is not exempt from the economic ilia which have beset the rest of the community," Dr. Watt said. "At the present time there is, I think, a surplus of nurses. This is due to two causes. One is that in the past wa have trained too many nurses, and the other is that at the prosent time there is less illness among the community, with the result that there are fewer calls for the services of the trained nurse. "It is a strange thing that in these times of distress and poverty and want of food, the amount of sickness seems definitely to be less than it was in more prosperous times," said Dr. Watt. Last week he had read a report on a conference of the American Hospital Association, at which one and all the delegates had stated that in their experience their hospitals had fewer patients during the present bad times than they had when days were brighter. "We as a departmont have noticed the same thing in New Zealand, 1 ' he said. "On a recent tour, one of our officers found that in practically all the hospitals he visited there were fewer patients than at any time in our experience. The Department and the Nurses and the Medical Registration Board are very perturbed at this state of affairs, as it affected nurses, and have taken whatever aetioa they could to meet the situation." One measure adopted, Dr. Watt said, was the elimination of the smaller training schools. He thought it had been established that _ there were too many training schools in New Zealand Some of the institutions were too small to give tlio all-round type of instruction, which the present-day nurse should have. In the last twelve months or so no fewer than nine institutions had ceased to train nurses.