Obstetrical Nursing: A Text-Book on the Nursing Care of the Expectant Mother, the Woman in Labor, the Young Mother and Her Baby — John Shaqi
Obstetrical Nursing: A Text-Book on the Nursing Care of the Expectant Mother, the Woman in Labor, the Young Mother and Her BabyVan Blarcom, Carolyn Conant
Science
Obstetrical Nursing: A Text-Book on the Nursing Care of the Expectant Mother, the Woman in Labor, the Young Mother and Her Baby
Van Blarcom, Carolyn Conant
Infants -- Care; Maternity nursing; Pregnancy
If the nurse convinces herself of the import of these requirements and
is exacting of herself in giving them broad interpretation, she cannot
but nurse her patients well.
She will appreciate the invariable need for cleanliness and watchfulness
if she will hark back to the fact that our mothers and babies die in
distressingly large numbers from infections, toxæmias, and nutritional
disturbances, all of which are usually amenable to preventive or early
treatment.
In order to be always clean, always watchful, and always ready to
execute, both in letter and spirit, the orders of doctors whose methods
of treatment will differ, the nurse will need to be very adaptable. She
will need to keep a clear head and an open mind and to remember always
the ends that are being striven for: the immediate safety and the future
wellbeing of the mother and the baby. And she may rest assured that, no
matter how they vary as to details, all doctors want all of their
patients to be given clean care; watched for symptoms of complications;
and given good general nursing.
Considering the need for cleanliness in a very broad and practical
sense, the nurse will realize that the test of her ability to protect
her maternity patients from infection is not what she is able to do in a
hospital where there is every facility for clean work. It is not the
ability to maintain asepsis in a tiled operating room that counts, where
she is aided by sterilizers, basins, and solutions of various kinds and
colors, a wealth of ingenious appliances and a corps of co-workers. It
is the understanding and imagination which will enable her, perhaps
single-handed, to carry the principles of such work into a patient’s
home; to do clean work, from the standpoint of avoiding infection, in a
mountain hut or a city tenement where everything is dirty.
The nurse will do well to begin to develop her powers of adaptability
while she is still in training. She may greatly increase the value of
her hospital experience by trying always to understand the purpose of
the care which she is giving and trying at the same time to imagine how,
in an average home, she would accomplish the results of this or that
procedure which is made easy of execution in the hospital by special
equipment. She should never lose sight of the fact that she is not being
trained solely to conform to any one hospital routine or to become
expert in only one method of nursing care. She is being prepared to go
out and give nursing care to any young woman and her baby who need it,
no matter where or how they are situated or by what methods they are
treated.
If conditions are such that the doctor’s orders and the patient’s
requirements seem impossible of fulfillment, then the nurse must attempt
the impossible and attempt it with confidence of success.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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