Training of district nurses / report of the Advisory Committee.

  • Great Britain. Advisory Committee on the Training of District Nurses.
Date:
1959
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Training of district nurses / report of the Advisory Committee. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    10. The purpose of the course is to enable the nurse to become efficient in district nursing, but no syllabus of training can cover every aspect of the field of work subsequently to be encountered. We have, therefore, endeavoured to make provision for the teaching of essential principles that will serve as a foundation for the nurse’s subsequent work in the home nursing field. 11. In our opinion, instruction should include the adaptation of hospital nursing techniques to nursing in the home, the nursing of illnesses met in- frequently in hospital, sufficient knowledge of the social services to enable the nurse to recognize when one or more of these services might be necessary for the welfare of the patient, the teaching of home care to relatives and the use of opportunities for health education. 12. We have based our syllabus on the assumption that full use will be made of modern teaching methods with the number of formal lectures kept to a minimum and by intention, therefore, it is not detailed. 13. Since the course is intended to be of as practical a nature as possible, we would stress the importance of demonstrations, in particular demonstrations on posture and lifting, and such visual aids as films and film strips being used with lectures wherever possible and of visits covering a wide and varied field, e.g. to local authority health services, factory health and welfare departments, old people’s homes and industrial rehabilitation centres. As every nurse may not be able to make all these visits, we would suggest that one or more of those under training should cover each of the items in the programme so that by pooling information through group discussion, all the students may learn something of the work of these. establishments. 14. The nurse should also be given the opportunity of becoming acquainted with advanced cancer cases and we think it would be advantageous if a visit to a Radiotherapeutic Centre or a Cancer Unit could be arranged 1 in conjunction with the lecture on cancer. 15. We are of the opinion that experience in a rural area should, wherever possible, be included in all training schemes. 16. We would advise one study day a week or alternatively an equivalent total period of time in a block system, depending on the nature of the area in which the nurses undertake the practical work, the premises and staff available for teaching and the number of students. 17. In our view, it is important that the content of both the practical and the. theoretical training should be capable of adaptation to meet the needs of the individual nurse according to her (or his) experience and aptitude. The nurse who has had special experience in the care of old people, for example, will clearly need less tuition in this aspect of home nursing than another student who has worked with children. | 18. We recommend that in its early stages training should include both demonstrations at the training school and experience in the patient’s home. The student should be introduced to nursing on the district as early as possible. During the early stages of her training we would expect her to work under the guidance of an experienced district nurse, the degree of supervision being reduced until she is able to take nursing charge of her patients. In this way, the student would give some service to the training authority, but we cannot stress too strongly that the training should be related to the needs of the students rather than to the immediate needs of a local health authority’s home nursing service.