Notes on the Medical Paper

Kai Tiaki : the journal of the nurses of New Zealand, Volume VIII, Issue 3, 1 July 1915, Page 150

Notes on the Medical Paper

It is always interesting to the examiner when he hears the paper set, subjected to criticism by the candidates. I learned incognito that the paper in medicine, set for the nurses, was more suited for medical students. Quite a fair criticism, perhaps, but one would pay a poor compliment to the nurses, and their instructors, if one did not give them credit for common sense as well as crammed information from text books or lectures. Their syllabus includes elementary physiology, and their practical training gives

them facilities for observation of medical cases so that a paper set for medical students is usually quite a fair one for nurses, and vice versa, although, of course, the examiner expects to get answers of quite a different type and standard in the two cases. Some candidates are seized with panic if the question is not one of the stereotyped character which can be answered " from the book/' whereas a little originality shown by them is of much more value to the examiner in determining their stan-

dard of intelligence, education, and experience. Candidates are prone to use phrases and names rather than to describe experiences as actually known to them. The lady who described a type of breathing as "chained stoats," possibly had quite a clear mental picture of the phenomenon, but she did not impart it to the examiner ; the other who recommended : "Len Hall's diet" in the gastric ulcer case, conveyed to him the fact that she was an attendant at lectures rather than a nurse with a first hand knowledge of diets. The purely nursing questions were very well answered ; but the physiology of heat regulation was a difficulty for many, this was a question which gave an opportunity for a display of commonsense, and general knowledge ; but because the lectures or text books had not crammed the candidates on the subject, many were content to ignore the matter altogether, or else dismiss it with two or three lines on the subject of sweat glands, whereas a little thought about their own requirements in health

would have given them plenty to write about with regard to heat loss, and heat production, whether voluntary, or involuntary. The causes of gastric pain are surely often enough met with by nurses of any practical experience ; but many candidates were quite at a loss when they had enumerated gastric ulcer and indigestion, forgetting all about carcinoma, flatulence, byperchlorhydria, the gastric crisis of tabes, or the pain so often referred to the stomach by children at the onset of pneumonia, due to diaphragmatic pleursy. In conclusion, I may say that the questions, as a whole, were well answered, and I could not help feeling that no one should really have failed as even those unlucky ones who failed to reach the standard apparently knew their work ; but were either too indolent, or too inexperienced in writing answers, to convey to the examiner the extent of their practical knowledge or experience, when they found themselves devoid of potted information culled from text books.