Subsidiary Notes as to the Introduction of Female Nursing into Military Hospitals in Peace and WarNightingale, Florence
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Subsidiary Notes as to the Introduction of Female Nursing into Military Hospitals in Peace and War
Nightingale, Florence
Military hospitals -- Great Britain; Nurses -- Great Britain
One woman cannot sleep alone in the Pavilion. The Nurses must sleep
together near the Matron’s quarters. If the Nurses sleep away from
the wards there should be some way by which a Nurse can at once be
summoned, in case of any urgency in her ward, and it would be well
to consider this in the distribution of quarters. Either the Matron
should lock the Nurses’ quarters at night, and any summons should be
brought to her and by her referred to the Nurse; or the summons should
go straight to the Nurse’s door. There are difficulties both ways,
even supposing these summons should be unfrequent. The Nurse of each
Pavilion should inhabit the room on the ground-floor ward, where the
heaviest surgical cases will be probably placed, whence she can better
command the movements of the Pavilion, and attend the entrance of the
Surgeon.
[Sidenote: 2. Head Nurse’s Day in a Pavilion Hospital.]
2. Her day might be something like this (in time, perhaps, God will
bless us with some Army Chaplain who will get up early and give us a
very short service morning and evening):--
She should be effective, and enter the Pavilion about 6 A.M., go
through the wards, read prayers in one by turns at the appointed hour,
and give out the linen wanted. (Six is the nominal hour when the Head
Nurses of one great London Hospital enter on their duty.) Here must
be no nominal hours, all must be real, though not overstrained. Then
the dressings, &c., attendance on Surgeons, &c. With 72 patients on
different floors, she must train the Orderlies to do the lighter
dressings (by training I mean real teaching, not leaving the Orderly to
find them out himself); she must see all the wounds of all her wards
which she does not dress herself at least every other day (which she
can do by seeing some in the morning and some in the evening), and she
must dress the heavy cases of all the wards herself. All this, with
method, and not losing time by fetching and waiting, an efficient Head
Nurse can do.
She must be responsible for the linen of the wards; but this must be
simplified as much as can be, so as to secure responsibility, yet
relieve the Nurse of unnecessary time spent over it.
The Nurse should be relieved of all writing and counting, on the score
of loss of time incurred. It will not do to charge a Nurse, with
seventy-two patients on three different floors, with serving each man
his portion of diet; the diets of two wards would get cold while she
was serving the first. It will be better to make the Ward-Master of
Pavilion wards responsible for the serving the diets. There must, of
course, be a card at each bed, or some other record, showing the diet
the man is ordered. The Nurse must know at a moment’s glance what each
patient is ordered.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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