WELFARE OF NURSES

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22901, 2 December 1937, Page 5

WELFARE OF NURSES

VALUABLE PROFESSION DANGER OF EXPLOITATION EPILOGUE TO CONGRESS .As an epilogue to tlio Quadrennial In ternational Congress of . Nurses, the Times published a leader under the heading of "Welfare of Nurses." The purport of the leader was to emphasise the importance of recognising the tremendous value to the community of the nursing profession and the need for tlio full recognition of that value. "The Quadrennial International Congress of Nurses," said the Times, "has added prestige to a profession which from year to year is realising more clearly its office and its mission. Nursing received its modern accolade from Miss Nightingale, but there had been ealrlier occasions when reverence was to the spirit which compels to service in circumstances of the greatest difficulty and distress. Reverence finds a new justification to-day in knowledge which ,is ever increasing and broadening, and in technical skill which is making knowledge more and more, effective. If the congress has proved nothing else, it has proved that a vocation and a profession ar» complementary to one apother. s"But the nurses insist, with propriety, that vocation must not be exploited and thus robbed of its effective-' nesis. The discussions about hours of work, food, bousing and remuneration have public as well as professional importance, and cannot wisely be overlooked, even by hospital authorities. "Nurses have borne heavy burdens in the past, and none has heard complaint from them. But a congress of nurses has a duty laid upon it to warn Governments and institutions that such fortitude represents waste rather than example, and constitutes a slur upon those 011 whose behalf it is being exhibited. "Nor is the plea of poverty any adequate defence of conditions which obtain to-day in far too many institutions. Sweated nursing is necessarily and inevitably second-rate nursing, if only because /i nurse who is physically witary cannot satisfactorily perform her office. Such a nurse may be ready to give her health for her patients—and the sacrifice is by no means unknown; but she cannot give what she does not possess—namely, the alertness and activity which belong solely to those

who have been refreshed and restored by leisure. Because her leisure ,is insufficient, or which is the same thing unduly restricted in its scope by lack of means, she will derive less benefit from her training than might have been derived from it, and she will carry this handicap, with daily additions, throughout her active life. "Nor is the prospect of what awaits her when her active life is finished, calculated always to alleviate her anxiety. A profession which demands excessive expenditure of youth and health is a profession ill-organised and inefficient. The Congress of Nurses- is to be congratulated on having set the wellbeing of the nurse herself side by side with that of her patients, and on having insisted upon the incongruity of fatigue with treatment. Against that background of common sense the lectures and discussions upon technical subjects have achieved an added significance in keeping with, their catholic nature."