Making Good on Private Duty: Practical Hints to Graduate NursesLounsbery, Harriet Camp
Science
Making Good on Private Duty: Practical Hints to Graduate Nurses
Lounsbery, Harriet Camp
Private duty nursing
Suppose that this baby is the third or fourth, the mother knows
what to do for the new little one, but how about the others? She
is still anxious to do what is right, or perhaps she is not
anxious, and her attitude toward the children is not what it
should be. Perhaps she does not realize that she will be called to
account for these souls intrusted to her care, that these bodies
will do their part in life, well or ill, as she treats them wisely
or foolishly. Here is true missionary work. A thoughtful,
intelligent, judicious nurse can show a mother that an adenoid may
be responsible for Johnny's inattention, as it causes dullness of
hearing, how Mary's fretfulness is caused by too little sleep or
by insufficient ventilation of her room at night. She can explain
how irregular eating causes the children to be cross and
irritable. She can show why the first teeth should be removed when
the second begin to push towards the gum. She can teach the mother
that the headaches so often met with, in children who go to
school, are due, perhaps, to eye strain, and can not be corrected
with pills, and should never be soothed with headache powders. She
can show the evils of the gallons of soda water too many young
women swallow, of the injudiciousness of allowing young girls to
congregate in drug stores. These last two evils, "soda water and
the drug store habit," the mother may know nothing about. She is
busy at home with the "little ones," and the fourteen- or sixteen-
year-old girl only too often is allowed to wander off "down town"
with other young girls, and what she does there would astonish
many a mother.
Every nurse should know how to teach her patient to guard herself
and her children from tuberculosis. She should be able to show
what the early symptoms are, what is then necessary to do, what
care should be taken of the sputum, of the patient's food, of his
eating and drinking vessels, his bed and bedding. She should know
how to teach a tuberculosis patient to care for himself, how he
can avoid giving his disease to others, if he stays at home; and
where he will find proper hospital or sanatorium accommodations if
he goes away.
Most mothers are very thankful for practical hints from one who is
supposed to know, and who, during a four to six weeks' stay, makes
herself one of the family, and offers advice in the _right
way_ and _at the right time_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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