CONFINEMENT CASES

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26348, 31 December 1946, Page 3

CONFINEMENT CASES

PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECT Tutor sisters assembled in Wellington for a post-graduate refresher course and obstetrical sisters from Wellington and Lower Hutt had the privilege of an address from Sir William Fletcher Shaw last Wednesday evening. The English visitor chose as his subject “Human Aspects in Obstetrical Nursing." He urged his audience to keep constantly before themselves and those whom they were training the fact that the psychology of the patient and of her husband were Just as Important considerations as were the purely scientific ones of asepsis and nursing technique. He said the modern sister was a highlytrained worker, but nothing in modern education could make a good nurse unless the latter had the gift of human understanding, which was the main equipment of the midwife who/ served 20 or 30 years ago. Sir Wiliam said that he believed that the former custom of confinements taking place in patients’ own homes had imposed a measure of stress and anxiety upon the husbands also. He suggested that this may have been Nature’s method of ensuring that husbands realised what their wives went through and valued their children and home life accordingly; so he suggested that now that institutional care of obstetrical cases was becoming the rule in approximately 95 per cent, of New Zealand births, the doctors and obstetrical sisters might use their discretion and tact and ensure that the husbands were not entirely relieved of their anxieties once their wives crossed the doorstep of the obstetrical hospital