Report of the Royal Commission on the practice of subjecting live animals to experiments for scientific purposes : with minutes and evidence and appendix / presented to both Houses of Parliament by command of her Majesty.

  • Great Britain. Royal Commission on Vivisection (1875)
Date:
1876
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Report of the Royal Commission on the practice of subjecting live animals to experiments for scientific purposes : with minutes and evidence and appendix / presented to both Houses of Parliament by command of her Majesty. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

    1041/1052 (page 611)
    7. Do not the District Nurses want re-tempering in the Hospital at least three months every two years ? or if they stay so long, every seven years for a year ? Supposing the District Nurse most perfectly trained, is it possible that she can keep herself up to anything like a standard of Trained Nursing, if there is— (1.) No Trained Lady Visiting Superintendent over her (the Local Superin- tending Lady being rarely, if ever, a trained Nurse); (2.) No practical obedience to Doctor ; (3.) No skilled supervision at all. Must it not be a prodigy, under these circumstances, if the District Nurses nurse ? 8. The District Nurse— (1.) To devote her time to the work ; (2.) To live in a District Home, containing four or five District Nurses, under a Matron ; the District Home to include a sick kitchen, in which the Nurses take times about to cook for the Patients of all; and stores, &c. [This obviates all question as to whether the District Nurse may (a) take lodgers • (l>) if a widow with children, have her children living with her. Both are objectionable.] (3.) The District Nurse not to yive (any more than Hospital Nurses do) except by the system of tickets passing through the District Home. Let Nurses Nurse. 9. The District Matron, who shall herself be a Trained Nurse, not necessarily a gentlewoman, of each District Nurses' Home to have the receiving and issuing of the tickets and nourishment, &c., at the sick kitchen ; to take such share as the District Superintendent shall appoint in teaching the District Probationer Nurses at the bedside; in initiating the newly appointed District Nurse into her work ; and generally in supervising the District Nurses of her Home, both at their work and in the Home. (10.) Without some such system of trained supervision, working eifectually, District Nurses will always tend to become, not an army but a rout; District Nursing to become, not an organisation but a disorganisation; it will always tend, in fact, to decomposition. For little or nothing of what keeps the Hosjntal Nurse up to the mark—the Resident Medical Staff, the Consulting Medical Staff, the busy School of Students—the female hierarchy of Resident Matron over Sisters, and Sisters over Nurses and Probationers—the great publicity and esprit de corps of a Hospital—exist for the District Nurse. 11. The District Superintendent must be responsible directly to the Hospital Lady Superintendent for the things pertaining to the Nurses, for which, mutatis mutandis, an Assistant Matron would be responsible to her Head, while she will be responsible to the Committee, either directly or through her Superintendent, for the things pertaining to the cases nursed, and M^ork generally, which come under the Committee's jurisdiction. [Any confusion about this would either make the District Superintendent practically almost irresponsible; or would make the Committee's Secretary and the Hospital Lady Superintendent joint-heads of the Nurses—side by side jurisdictions —an impossible principle.] 12. On the whole, it would seem to require a higher class of woman to be District Nurse than even to be Hospital Nurse. If the District Nurse is merely an ordinary sort of woman, she does not find enough to do, except in epidemic times, when she is overwhelmed. There is not enough to do in healthy times to occupy an inferior class of woman ; but how much too much to do in teaching the poor cleanliness, care of children, how to obtain fresh air, how to prevent disease, &c. &c., to occupy the higher sort of woman ? N.B.—We have not entered here into the position and duties of the Local Supei'intending Ladies who undertake the raising of funds for their own district, and the exercise of certain relations with their District Nurse, because these are fully laid down in the Organisation of Liverpool—that great and hitherto unique work— into districts for nursing. 13. One most essential part af the District Nurse's duty is to report sanitaiy defects in her district, through the District Superintendent, to the Officer of Health. August 1874.