Nursing Sister's Long Service

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32048, 24 July 1969, Page 3

Nursing Sister's Long Service

When Sister Edith Morrison goes off duty for the last time on July 31 she will have completed 38 years associated with the Christchurch Hospital. In that time she has been sister-in-charge of the gynaecological and obstetrical, the ear, nose and throat, the gen-ito-urinary, the medical, and the infectious wards, For about 16 years she has been sister-in-charge of the outpatients’ ward.

Sister Morrison never had any doubts about her choice of career. From childhood she wanted to be a nurse. At the age of 14, when her three-year-old sister died in her arms, she knew for certain what she must do with her life. There was strong family opposition to her becoming a nurse. But Sister Morrison believes a district nurse who visited the Coromandel Peninsula, where the Morrisons lived, •‘talked her parents round.” “I began nursing by doing maternity at St Helens Hospital, Auckland, where three Christchurch girls persuaded me to do my general training at the Christchurch Hospital," Sister Morrison said yesterday.

In 1931 conditions for student nurses were hard. A girl needed to be dedicated to her work to persevere. Miss Morrison’s pay packet for her first month as a student nurse contained £1 10s 2d, she recalled. In those days trainees spent only three weeks in the preliminary school before going into a ward. Hours were long. A student nurse on the 6 a.m.3 p.m. duty, for instance, had

to start at 5.30 a.m. to clean out the ward and could not leave till all her work was done. “I worked for more than a month before getting a day off, though we were supposed to have a day off a week if possible,” she said. “Discipline was very strict. For the first year we had to be in by 8.30 p.m. after a day off and we were allowed a late pass to 11 p.m. once a month.” The students had no time off for study. They bad to return to their ward work after lectures.

Ward work was heavy. Patients with high fevers or acute infections had to be sponged every four hours, given hot fomentations and cold compresses where necessary. Today they would be treated with the appropriate antibiotics, she said. “We used to get very tired.

Button Switch.—An ordinary “Professor Higgins” style cardigan can be made, to look more expensive by changing the plastic buttons for leather or pearl ones. This switch can also be worked on a plain navy coat by substituting brass buttons for plain.

then have to settle down to swot after duty,” she said. “At first we slept in cubicles in an area that is now the medical centre before we were transferred to the old nurses home.” When Miss Morrison trained there were no grants for overseas study and very few nurses went away to gain further experience. “Today, however, 1 feel it is very important for nurses to take whatever opportunities they can to further their education to keep up with advances in medicine,” she said.

When she retires, Sister Morrison will take a holiday But she will never give up nursing entirely, “I expect I shall do parttime nursing wherever it is most needed,” she said. Sister Morrison was entertained by the North Canter* bury Hospital Board at morning tea yesterday.