40 Years Service As Plunket Nurse

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31500, 14 October 1967, Page 2

40 Years Service As Plunket Nurse

In 40 years as a Plunket nurse, Miss Corrie Welsh has attended thousands of babies. Throughout New Zealand are men and women, approaching middle age, whom she describes as “one of my babies,” or perhaps “the son of one of my babies.”

Miss Welsh, who has been Plunket sister in charge of the Lyttelton area for 13 years, will retire in a few weeks and will settle down to the task of recording her 40 years of trials and tribulations in book form.

In 1928 the Plunket Society, then relatively new, was viewed with suspicion. Clinics were held in church halls or vacant rooms. Plunket nurses “biked, hiked, hitched a ride with the milk waggon" or travelled any way they could. The diminutive Miss Welsh has driven Model-T Fords through flooded rivers In the Geraldine and Fairlie areas, has mended punctures, ehanged wheels, and even assisted at the birth of triplets—aU In the course of her work as a Plunket nurse. Twenty-five years ago she was responsible for the establishment of the first kindergarten in Oamaru. "The mothers’ club came to me and said they wanted a kindergarten and would boycott their mothers’ club meetings if I did not do something about it

“I got in touch with the head of the kindergarten movement in Wellington and a meeting was called. And that was the beginning of kindergartens in Oamaru,’* said Miss Welsh. After she completed her general nursing training in Wanganui, Miss Welsh came to Christchurch for a midwifery course at St Helens. She has since nursed in Dunedin, Invercargill, Wellington, Oamaru, Fairlie, Geraldine, Rangiora and Christchurch. Her posting in Christchurch has been in the Lyttelton district, which includes Port Levy, Heathcote, Redcliff s and Sumner. Today she has 300 babies and about 700 pre-school children under her care. She visits families in a car and babies are brought in to the smart modern clinics but she

still manages to provide a very personal service. The hour between 5.30 p.m. and 6.30 p.m. in her household is “mothers’ hour” because she sets it aside for mothers to telephone her to talk about their problems. She has offered this service for the 13 years she has been in Christchurch. The response had been “too good at times,” she said. Babies today were much healthier than they were.4o years ago, because of better diet and a correct routine, said Miss Welsh. “Looking back, I know that Truby King’s teachings were very sound. I met him briefly when I was doing my midwifery at St Helen's and he was the sort of man who wouldn’t take “no’ for an answer. “But I would like to see more young mothers taking advantage of mothercraft lectures and the Karitane hospitals. This gives them security if they are nervous,” she said.

Miss Welsh said she could not My enough to commend

the committees and voluntary workers in the society. "Mother often don’t realise how much money the committees must raise. It is because of the -committees that we have such modem facilities everywhere. I appreciate them because when I started they had to do the spade work.”

Miss Welsh is convinced that Plunket nursing is the most rewarding form of nur-

sing. “We are In direct contact with the mothers and we know their home life. We are associated with them over a period of yean and get to know them very well. “When problems arise we are privileged to be confided in. There are opportunities for social work which occur in no other type of nursing.” There is a strong family tradition in Plunket ntirsing. Many of Miss Welsh’s babies are now parents themselves and she attends some of their babies.

One of her triplets who arrived unexpectedly in North Canterbury years ago is now a parent and Miss Welsh attends her son.

“We had only prepared for one baby and we had to take the tiny triplets to Karitane Hospital by bus,” she Mid.

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