Nursing reform "necessary"

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32660, 16 July 1971, Page 5

Nursing reform "necessary"

“Nursing is at a cross-roads and reform is necessary. Failure to take appropriate action will result in continuing deterioration of this aspect of our health services,” the DirectorGeneral of Health (Dr D. P. Kennedy) says in his introduction to the annual report of the Department of Health tabled in Parliament.

Nursing education, he says, is a matter for serious concern. “Almost half the students who enter training fail to complete. Less than 30 per cent of the tutors are qualified. Those qualified are thinly spread over 46 schools of nursing, and in many schools which teach only a small number of students. “Too few of the students who qualify remain in nursing. Nursing has become unattractive- to both student and qualified nurses. The solution does not lie with lowering education prerequisites, as the loss is higher from nursing programmes that have no preentry educational requirements,” Dr Kennedy says. Referring to the report of the World Health Organisation consultant in nursing education Dr Helen Carpenter, who visited New Zealand last year, Dr Kennedy says that closely allied with

it is the view that all education for the health professions should be established under the educational authorities. He notes that from this year the technical institutes and polytechnics are providing educational training for an increasing number of groups pharmacy, chiropody, dental technicians, and occupational therapy in the department of health sciences of the Central Institute of Technology; laboratory technology tn the four main centres; health - inspector training at the Wellington Polytechnic. “Other disciplines such as physiotherapy and radiography,” says Dr Kennedy, “have yet to be closely examined before a decision can be made regarding their appropriate educational locaItion.”