[Report 1945] / Medical Officer of Health, Nottinghamshire County Council.

  • Nottinghamshire County Council
Date:
1945
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: [Report 1945] / Medical Officer of Health, Nottinghamshire County Council. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    War-time stresses, physical and psychological, have been permuted rather than removed, so that perplexity succeeds anxiety and dis¬ illusionment out-places hope. These are factors which leadership must face with imagination, and health workers must, by example, unremitting and zealous, combat. Shortage of Nurses. It is my plain duty to express concern at the relentless trend of difficulty in maintaining full, alert and adequate Health Services of several types owing to staffing difficulties. Nurses for Hospitals and for Mental Institutions, Midwives, Health Visitors, Social Workers—all are inadequate in numbers to meet the demand. This inadequacy not only justifies alarm as to the maintenance of the several vital services, but creates a vicious circle which both affects recruitment and risks demoralisation of existing staff's by reason of the pressure under which duties have to be performed and the sense of frustration resulting. A good Health Visitor, a good Nurse, each likes to do her duty well and truly and only so can have real satisfaction ; to be trying to do more than one person’s work and to know that work is incompletely done is, over a prolonged period, inevitably soul-destroying. To relieve the situation, from the point of view of staff overstrain, by closing hospital beds or reducing services not only fails as a remedy for the sense of frustration (for no Nurse can be happy to know of long waiting lists and closed beds, nor any Health Visitor be satisfied to curtail her home visiting or see her Welfare Centres reduced), but also does grave injury to the Public Health and morale. The emergency is here, it is not merely threatened, and there is no visible sign of any near or even distant alleviation. Many expedients have been tried locally to meet the situation, but despite the use of Male Nurses, of Assistant Nurses in greater dilution, of part-time Nurses and of voluntary helpers, the fact remains that at our Sanatorium we keep our beds open only at the cost of heavy demands on staff and live a constant “ hand to mouth ” existence ; at our County General Hospital we cannot use more than three-quarters of our beds, and at the Westdale Certified Institution, where beds are in heavy demand, we have never been able to open more than half the beds. In Health Visiting staff the establishment is deficient by six and there are six vacancies in the establishment of County Midwives. Meanwhile the demand for beds, for Health Visiting services and for Domiciliary Midwives grows.