Читать книгу Kelly Vana's Nursing Leadership and Management - Группа авторов - Страница 177

The nurse training period in the 1920s was typically 3 years. This time was mainly spent working within different wards of the hospital and attending lectures after work. But this was not an apprenticeship. The students were the nurses for the hospital patients. They were not practicing under the direction of graduate nurses. A national study by the Committee on the Grading of Nursing Schools in the early 1930s found that two‐thirds of the schools did not have even one graduate nurse employed for bedside nursing (Committee, 1934, p. 180). Upon graduation, the new crop of nurses were given a diploma and left the hospital, mainly to work as nurses in private homes, while the hospital nurse training school admitted a new batch of students. Hospital administrators could not ignore the advantage of an unpaid nursing workforce and the number of nurse training schools mushroomed. In 1880, there had been 15 schools. In 1920, there were 2,155 schools (Burgess, 1928, p. 35). However, many of these new nurse training schools were situated in small or specialist hospitals, entirely unsuited to general nursing education. Furthermore, as noted earlier, African Americans were rarely accepted as students or nurses at White hospitals, while men were rarely accepted at any hospital or nurse training school. A few male only and African American only nurse training schools were founded; the latter also served as training and practice sites for African American physicians and other health care workers.

Nurse leaders were concerned at the direction nursing education was taking. Some university schools of nursing were opening and the large teaching hospitals still gave a broad education and attracted well‐educated nursing students. But these nurse training schools were in the minority. The Committee on the Grading of Nursing Schools, cited earlier, publicized this issue but did not correct it. The correction came from the financial collapse of the Great Depression. In essence, people could not afford to hire nurse training school graduates as private duty nurses. Thus, the graduate nurses were desperate for work and accepted positions in hospitals for just their room and board. This being even cheaper for hospitals than operating training schools, the smaller, poorer schools rapidly began to close. From 1926 to 1936, there was a drop in the number of hospital‐based diploma nursing schools nationwide, from 2,155 schools in 1926 to 1,478 schools in 1936 (JAMA, 1937).