[Report 1942] / Medical Officer of Health, Cumberland County Council.

  • Cumberland (England). County Council.
Date:
1942
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: [Report 1942] / Medical Officer of Health, Cumberland County Council. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    10/58 (page 8)
    ,s consistently drawn attention to the meagre salaries and pensions paid to district nurses, I am glad that substantially increased salaries and improved conditions of service are now recommended. There is little doubt that the adoption of the new scale and recommendations will be general throughout the country, in fact almost automatic, and authorities which do not adopt the new scale will simply have no midwives. While., however, these proposals, ending a state of affairs which, until comparatively recently, was really disgraceful, are welcome, yet there are several points in the proposals which are extremely difficult to understand or. to approve. Under these recommendations a woman employed whole-time as a midwife will receive a salary rising to /SbO per annum if she holds the midwives’ certificate only, but if she is also a fully trained State Registered Nurse she will rise to £360 per annum, i.e., £10 more. The training for the Certificate of the Central Midwives Board is at present a hvo vears’ training. If a woman goes through the training of a State Registered Nurse and thereafter takes the training for the certificate of the Central Midwives Board (in this case one year), she, in the majority of cases, will have devoted five vears of her life to this combined training. For this she gets an extra £10 a vear. This is indeed a strange valuation to place on three years of a nurse’s life spent in additional training. The position is really worse than this because there are \’ery many midwives throughout the country whose midwifery training so far from taking two years has not exceeded twelve months, and in not a few cases has been for six months only. The actual position in Cumberland, which I imagine is typical, is that only tM'o midwives ha\’e devoted more than twelve months to their midwifery training. Nevertheless, any midwife who holds the Certificate, whether as the result of .six months’ training or hmgcr will be entitled, if she devotes all her time to midwifery, to the maximum benefits of the new .scale. That is olnaousb' ineciuitable to the nurse who has done five vears’ training, and it is much to be regretted that the White Pajx-'r made no reference to extended training for midwives complcmentai'y to the new salary proposals. I understand that there is a ]iroposal that there should be instituted a specialised traiiung for midwives of three or lour N'cars’ duration, and that mi(lwifer\' should become a di.stinct ])rofcssion. Should this take jdace it is iiuite clear that the new emoluments would be fulh' justified. The