Workhouse Nursing: The story of a successful experiment — John Shaqi
Workhouse Nursing: The story of a successful experimentNightingale, Florence
History
Workhouse Nursing: The story of a successful experiment
Nightingale, Florence
Nursing; Poor -- Medical care
This report was unanimously adopted by the Workhouse Committee and
by the Vestry; and already the new system has been extended to the
Female Wards. It is in contemplation to extend it also to the Fever
Hospital, as soon as a sufficient number of suitable nurses shall
have been trained.
It will be observed that the report contemplates the training of
probationers for other Workhouse Infirmaries. And it is, indeed, to
be hoped that in this and other ways the Liverpool Workhouse
Hospital may serve as a normal school, from which the system there
adopted may spread. The _special_ expenses of such a school would
naturally be borne by the parishes which profited by its services in
educating nurses for them, or by the Government. But this point is
one which, as yet, has hardly demanded practical consideration.
The experiment whose results have been recorded, could hardly have
been tried at all—certainly could not have achieved such rapid
success—had it not been for the powerful and liberal assistance of
Miss Nightingale, and the Trustees of the Nightingale Fund. Feeling
how very important was the extension of the system of superior
professional nursing, now gradually gaining ground in general
hospitals, to workhouses, they sent, to assist in the initial
experiment made in this direction, a lady superintendent and twelve
superior nurses—a very expensive and quite invaluable contribution.
To the Liverpool Vestry and its officers belongs the credit of
having overcome all the difficulties, and persevered in spite of all
the discouraging incidents, which necessarily attended an attempt to
introduce a new system of management into such an institution as a
Workhouse Hospital, combining as it does two subjects so different
in their aspects and conditions of treatment, so difficult to deal
with together, as pauperism and sickness. Of the Lady Superintendent
I shall say little. When a lady leaves a happy home, and goes
through a long and laborious course of training to fit herself for
such a situation, purely because, feeling that she possessed the
capacity for nursing, and the requisite health, energy, strength,
and spirits, she desired to devote such powers to the service of
those who stood most in need of them, human praise or criticism of
her choice is out of place. One of the incidental results of her
exertions has to her, no doubt, been even a higher reward than that
improvement in the condition of the sick, in their progress towards
recovery, and their material comfort, which has been the direct
object of her labours. The improvement in the tone and behaviour of
the patients has been wonderful. Many of the inmates of a pauper
hospital are persons of the worst character, and its wards, under
the control of pauper nurses, often present scenes so disgusting
that the respectable poor shrink from them with utter abhorrence,
and after once becoming acquainted with them, will often rather die
than return thither. When the trained nurses were first introduced,
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