NURSES AND NURSING CONDITIONS

Dominion, Volume 21, Issue 287, 4 September 1928, Page 13

NURSES AND NURSING CONDITIONS

Sir, —It is reassuring to learn that hospital boards, all over the Dominion are beginning to bestir themselves and seriously discuss the nursing conditions prevailing in our public hospitals. The whole thing is a positive scandal. I can affirm definitely that a daughter of mine while a probationer in a large North Island hospital worked often for ten hours a day (instead of the eight supposed to be the normal working day), and all through her period of training was not infrequently for from four to six weeks without a single day off; and I have good reason to believe that the conditions are pretty much the same in the public hospitals throughout the Dominion, The Wairarapa Hospital Board has apparently concluded that the nurses are accepted at an immature age, and when physically unfit for tlie work. This cannot mean much, for they are supposed to be accepted after a careful medical examination. Is the true explanation that very few candidates are offering, for the profession because of tlie reputation which most of our hospitals have acquired for overworking their nurses, and so many unfits have to be accepted? The Wairarapa Board in its generosity is going to offer fourth-year nurses £7O a year and its staff nurses £9O. Take a female teacher whose work is of no greater importance to the community, and whose intelligence is not necessarily of a higher order than that of a purse. She can, after a training of two or three years, and after “keeping” herself save (if she is wise and frugal) nearly twice as much per year as a nurse can earn in the shape of salary. Is this as it ought to be? Let me ask a few questions, which can be easily answered by the Health Department : — (1) Why should (in some of our hospitals) young nurses be kept on duty for three months at a time in tubercular wards —one nurse often having to do night duty in a ward of from 30 to 40 patients in tlie “shelters”? (2) Could the tubercular nursing not be done by nurses of more advanced years and those likely to be immune? (This is, I believe, the custom in some of our hospitals.) (3) Is it true that in one of our sanatoriums nine nurse, or ex-nurse, patients from one of our North Island hospitals are to be found, and some few more are unable to secure admission for want of room ? There are several other questions that I should like to ask, but I forbear for the present.—l am, etc.. EX-NURSE’S DAD. Wellington, August 28. [The following are the replies of the Health Department to the questions raised in the above letter: — (1) No nurse should be kept on duty for three months at a time in tubercular wards.

(2) The general custom is to give nurses this experience after they have had some little experience, in order that they may be able to safeguard themselves from the risk of infection. (3) This can scarcely be true. The Otaki Sanatorium certainly has not nine nurses or ex-nurse patients from “one of our North Island hospitals.” It is the one sanatorium receiving women patients from the North Island.] j