The surprising history of New Zealand's nurses & More News Here

In 1789 Benjamin Franklin wrote “in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes”. In 2022, Franklin is likely to be moved so as to add nurses, as your probability of getting by way of life with out one tending to you is just about nil.

Unlike taxes and loss of life, nurses come into the constructive class, all the time there to assist, to heal, to appease fears or make it easier to keep away from sickness.

In truth, you would possibly say they’re sacrificing angels and heroines.

WARNING: If you do say that, don’t do it inside earshot of historian and nurse Dr Pamela Wood, whose e-book New Zealand Nurses: Caring for our People 1880-1950 was revealed in April.

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Wood says angels and heroines are loaded phrases, which created a fable round nursing, one which her analysis reveals immediately led to 140 years of poor pay compared to different professions.

Explode that fable. Nursing is just not do-gooding in a uniform. It’s not all Florence Nightingale, The Lady With the Lamp. It’s a career. It’s research, it’s exhausting work, it’s serving to people who find themselves sick or needing surgical procedure, it’s selling well being and serving to individuals to remain nicely.

Professionals, not angels

“Nurses don’t want to be perceived as heroic. That is not what they say about themselves,” Wood says. Up till as late because the Nineteen Sixties, nurses needed to depart in the event that they married, a restriction that merely added to the parable it was a whole-hearted calling.

“People going into nursing never thought about it like this – the idea of being a self-sacrificing dedicated person who gave up all for nursing wasn’t the way nurses themselves saw it.”

And but that was the best way the New Zealand public noticed it, and their view proved a handbrake on the flexibility to earn an honest wage, as these with the purse strings held them tight when it got here to paying the largest phase of the well being workforce.

“This has been something that’s endured all the way through the decades from the 1880s,” Wood says. “The public, in the sense of admiration of nursing, often called them sacrificing angels and heroines.

“This worked against the idea that nurses had of themselves. They saw themselves as proficient professionals, not self-sacrificing angels, and that was one reason why nursing – New Zealand nursing – has had a 140-year record of being underpaid.

“Nurses have made great strides very recently. In their salaries. But the nurses working outside of the DHB system are still looking for that recognition of salaries. And certainly that idea that they are heroic and self-sacrificing doesn’t help in trying to get that recognition.”

The nursing reform motion led by Nightingale originated in Britain within the 1860s, noticed nursing leaders (matrons) despatched across the British Empire with their concepts about cleanliness and self-discipline. Annie Crisp, the primary Nightingale-trained matron, landed in New Zealand within the Eighties.

Nursing was feminised, and to encourage younger girls to turn into nurses, supervised nurses’ properties have been arrange on hospital premises. And but 40 years on, In the mid Twenties, a lady was higher off working as an workplace clerk, or as a cleaner than she was as a nurse. The pay was increased, the hours shorter and the accountability much less heavy.

Nurses earned on common 52 kilos ($104) yearly, an workplace employee 70 kilos, a cleaner and a waitress 100 kilos.

“As you know, female occupations have always been paid less. And those 1926 statistics were looking at female occupations … and of all those, nursing was the lowest.” Until the career was added to superannuation in 1926, nurses have been usually farewelled with a handbag of sovereigns.

It all riled up the National Council of Women, who stated on the time nurses have been “scandalously paid”. “The career of a nurse was one of self sacrifice, and she frequently had matters of life and death in her hands,” the council stated.

In her analysis, which has spanned a long time, Wood discovered “the historical sources are very clear” in the place the unhelpful pay-restricting picture of a therapeutic angel got here from.

“It’s the public talking at meetings, writing letters to the editor. In all of those ways, showing that that’s how they thought of nursing and nurses,” she says. “It wasn’t necessarily a ploy by those paying nurses, but it bolstered that idea that nurses could be low paid, and of course, being the largest workforce in the health system, it’s the one with the biggest budget implications.

“It’s good to know that this is changing, with significant gains in nursing salaries just recently, and I hope that continues so that nurses get the recognition as a valuable profession.”

Earthquakes, pandemics, warfare

After 30 years educating undergraduates and postgraduates, working right here and abroad, Wood opted to place her information into apply, and write a e-book primarily based on her analysis papers, so the general public might higher perceive her beloved career.

Wood casts a Florence Nightingale lamp over the work of her predecessors, and throughout its spectacular breadth of exercise. Excrement, pus, blood and sputum is splattered throughout the pages, not actually, you perceive.

“What has always struck me is the range of places that nurses have worked,” Wood says.

“It’s outside of hospitals; district nursing, historically backblocks nursing, nursing in Māori settlements, in factories and clinics and schools, and responding in disasters like earthquakes and pandemics. And war.

“That spread of places where nurses have worked is really crucial to understanding the profession. They’re very adaptable, nurses, very adaptable and resourceful and innovative in the way that they can create a nursing service to meet a particular need.”

Nurses have ridden horses and bicycles on their rounds. They’ve died of their uniforms; 10 have been torpedoed within the Mediterranean on troopship Marquette in 1915 throughout World War I, influenza claimed 42.

When the 1931 Napier earthquake felled the three-storey nurses residence, a rescuer was informed by a trapped nurse to have a tendency those that wanted assist greater than her. Soon after, a metal beam fell on her, crushing her head.

A century or so in the past if a nurse caught an sickness, it was the fault of the heroic self-sacrificing angels, or so skilled opinion ran. Obviously that they had didn’t take ample care.

“There was this culture of blame at the time that they weren’t being careful enough in their nursing if they got the patient’s disease,” Wood says. “The only times that nurses weren’t blamed for catching a patient’s disease were times like war backblocks nursing, and the fever camps. For immensely difficult circumstances, they weren’t blamed.

“That was different in 1918 because nurses were living in nurses homes, they weren’t married, they didn’t have immediate families to care for.”

No statistics exist on the quantity of nurses who died of illnesses caught off their sufferers, she says. Some died whereas nonetheless in coaching. “There have always been nurses who have died because of the work, we don’t cluster them together as numbers. It has always happened.”

So why a e-book? Wood calls it the logical fruits of years of work and analysis, and a narrative that wanted to be informed to the general public. And but, whenever you take heed to her ardour, her mild corrections of misguided questions, her non-judgmental steering of a befuddled interviewer towards the information, you get the concept this was a ardour from very early on.

And so it proves, with Wood saying her dolls and teddy bears got the easiest of care.

“I always wanted to be a nurse. I was one of those young people who can say that,” she laughs.

Then there was her first mentor in her neighbour Mrs James. “Mrs James across the road had been a nurse and I used to go and listen to her stories.

“She trained at Christchurch Hospital, in the 1930s. And I was riveted by the stories she could tell. So I had a sense from those times that there was a history to nursing as well.

“People aren’t coming into nursing programmes unless they want to help people who are sick and work in some way towards health. It’s very much part of it. The idea, the motivation has always been very varied. But still at the heart of it is wanting to be of use, and to help people.”

And so a nursing profession, then an educational one adopted, as she roamed from Middlemore, to Christchurch, Otago, Wellington, Melbourne and Napier. A nurse, a trainer of nurses, an educational, a historian, and now, writer.

And now a e-book as a result of, as Wood explains, most of her writing as a nursing historian had appeared in educational {and professional} journals, most of the general public by no means noticed.

“I wanted to pull together what I knew, and do some more research and have it as a book that was available to anyone who wanted it, anyone who wanted to read it,” she says. Commonly authors begin out full of zest, then discover the writing all a bit of a grind. Not on this case, Wood says. “I loved it all the way through”.

And even after 30 years of analysis, nursing nonetheless managed to shock her in a means that made her snigger at herself. “When I was talking to students who were new to nursing programs, I would ask them, what kind of nurse did they want to be, where do they want to work and so on?

“The ones who spoke up were always the ones saying ‘I want to work in intensive care. I want to work in emergency departments.’ They wanted all that drama and the bells and whistles, and I was thinking ‘what about working in medical wards and helping people with recovering and rehabilitation after strokes, what about all of that?’

“When I was doing the extra research for the book what I did find was chief nurses and other senior nurses in the past also saying `why do nurses always want to work in surgical nursing where there’s the drama and frequent turnover of patients? Why won’t they work in medical wards and rest homes and rural hospitals?’

“I thought, ‘Oh, here’s me thinking this was a big change’. And it’s not, it’s always been there. So that was such a surprise, that I had to laugh at myself. I had been coming at it as if it was something that was in my time, but not before.”

The parallels between NZ 1920 & Aotearoa 2022

While Wood factors out historic context can twist the best way issues are seen, 100 years on it’s potential to attract parallels between New Zealand 1920, and Aotearoa 2022: each had pandemics, shortages of nurses, and points round poor pay for nurses.

At the tail finish of WW1 – during which Kiwi nurses served in Europe – the Spanish flu epidemic struck. There have been lockdowns, isolation, nurses labored lengthy hours, and acquired sick.

“Nurses were absolutely needed during the 1918 influenza pandemic,” she says. “The parallel with today, if you like, is that nurses had then, as they do now, the aim of providing the best care possible for people.

“We have to be careful when we compare the past with the present because the context is always different.

“Now nurses are having to make really hard decisions about giving the best possible care, and at the same time protecting their families, and others outside of the hospital.

“That was different in 1918 because nurses were living in nursing homes, they weren’t married, they didn’t have immediate families to care for. The other major difference was that, in the 1918 pandemic, a quarter of the trained nursing workforce was still on service from the end of World War One, so the nurses in the country at the time were down in numbers. Three quarters of them got sick.

“We talk today about overwhelming the health system, and trying to avoid that. The health system back in 1918 was absolutely overwhelmed and had to rely on volunteers.”

Dirt, physique and obligation

Nursing then was about filth, physique and obligation. Cleaning was the very first thing realized: handwashing in days earlier than penicillin concerned scrubbing the arms for 10 minutes, then immersing them in biniodide of mercury.

Wood’s e-book additionally has useful nursing ideas, corresponding to how one can shake a thermometer, and how one can assess well being by the color, texture, and scent of poo. Sputum will be mucoid (skinny and colourless) or mucopurulent (thick, tenacious, greenish yellow) or purulent (yellow, thick with pus).

All very useful, you’ll agree, after which there are the Twenties qualities that have been requested of nurses. Here is the Code of Virtues: punctuality, obedience, technique, eager observance, loyalty and financial system (hospital and administration), sympathy, gentleness, tact, courtesy, cheerfulness, kindness tempered with firmness and calmness, even-tempered, dignified, truthful, dependable and cautious.

As if that wasn’t sufficient, some textual content books checklist further virtues: endurance, generosity, tenderness, a way of proportion and a way of humour.

But even when nurses do have a way of humour, don’t pull the “sacrificing angels and heroines” line. It’s not humorous now, and hasn’t been so for 140 years.

New Zealand Nurses: Caring for our People 1880-1950, Otago University Press, out now, $45.

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