Report of the Committee on Nursing / presented to Parliament by the Secretary of State for Social Services, the Secretary of State for Scotland, and the Secretary of State for Wales.

  • Great Britain. Committee on Nursing
Date:
1972
Catalogue details

Licence: Open Government Licence

Credit: Report of the Committee on Nursing / presented to Parliament by the Secretary of State for Social Services, the Secretary of State for Scotland, and the Secretary of State for Wales. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    51/344 page 39
    little research has been done on the actual effects of nursing intervention and care; the profession has few definitive guides for the improvement of practice’’. NURSING AND NON-NURSING DUTIES 116. The alternative to planning in terms of patient care is to plan nursing and midwifery work, as it has been planned conventionally, in terms of lists of duties. Such planning immediately leads to a protracted argument about the borderlines between nursing and non-nursing work and between midwifery and non-midwifery work. Historically there have been no clear boundaries, and as late as the Wood Report? published in 1947, first-year students were said to be spending thirty-three per cent of their time on domestic work, second-year students twenty-four per cent and third-year students sixteen per cent. 117. The responses to our questionnaire revealed clearly—as did the responses to the recruiting film—that it is non-nursing “‘chores”’ which seem to most nurses and midwives in training and later to separate image and reality. Thirty per cent of the hospital nurses and midwives (including fifty-three per cent of student nurses) felt that they had in the previous week carried out at least one duty which could have been carried out more appropriately by messengers, and forty- five per cent (including sixty-nine per cent of students, fifty-seven per cent of pupil nurses and fifty-two per cent of midwives) felt that they had in the previous week carried out at least one duty which could have been carried out more appropriately by domestic staff. The comparable figures for community nurses and midwives were twenty-five per cent who felt that they had in the previous week carried out at least one duty which could have been carried out more appropriately by messengers and seventeen per cent who felt that they had in the previous week carried out at least one duty which could have been carried out more appropriately by domestics. Fifty-seven per cent of health visitors felt that at least one piece of clerical work they had undertaken in the previous week should have been done by others. 118. The hospital figures particularly are disturbing, but all the figures reflect a widespread opinion that there is a waste of skills in nursing and midwifery. This sense of waste persists despite the repeated efforts that have been made of recent years to reduce non-nursing duties to a minimum. Both the Standing Nurs- ing Advisory Committee? and more recently the Salmon Committee? made recommendations on this subject. Successive Secretaries of State have emphasised the need to conserve precious nursing skills. The work of domestic staff has been reorganised in various ways. Yet while a number of our correspondents suggest that the wholesale delegation of non-nursing and non-midwifery duties diminishes the interest of nursing and midwifery and particularly in small hospitals and in the community may create organisational problems, our surveys show that nurses and midwives themselves still see much room for improvement. 119. We do not ourselves wish to draw clear-cut distinctions between nursing and non-nursing work. Some health duties may, according to the condition of the patient, be nursing or non-nursing or even “‘semi-nursing’’, to introduce a third 1 See list of references, no. 56. 2 See list of references, no. 12. 3 See list of references, no. 79.
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