The Clarksburg telegram. [volume] (Clarksburg, W. Va.) 1874-1926, 1912-05-02
Are to Be Made So as to
Prevent Monopoly of
Supplies Used.

WASHINGTON, D. c., April 20
Conditions making for inetiiciency
in schools for the professional train
ing OF nurses are dealt with in a
bulletin entitled 1.-THE Educational
Status of Nursing" which is short
ly to be issued for free distribution
by the United States Bureau of Ed
ucation. According to the bulletin,
there are schools which admit can
didates at as early an age as IL,
asking no educational qualifca-
tions except a common school edu-
cation, and sometimes not even that.
Other training schools require as
much as twelve hours day OF nurs-
ing from their students in addition,
to attendance ut classes and lectures.
Not infrequently, also, the students
are subjected to certain forms OF
commercial exploitation. These con-
dltlons exist, Notwithstanding a
number of advances made in recent
years in the professional training of
nurses. The bulletin is written by
Miss NJ. Adelaide Nutting, director
of the Department OF Nursing and
Health, Teachers College, Column
bia University, New York, and for
morly superintendent of nurses and
principal OF the Training School of
Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore,
The first count in Miss Nutting's
Indictment of nurses training
schools reads in the government
publication as follows:
THE condition of training schools
which is causing grave concern
among those who have long been
struggling to improve the education
of nurses is the persistence of low
standards for admission The enor-
nous multiplication of hospitals and
sanitaria throughout the coun-
try, with the consequent unrestricted
development OF training schools as
part of their working organization,
has led to very large demand for
students essentially for utilitarian
purposes. No adequate supply
could be secured through the usual
sources with the maintenance of
suitable standards, and such stand
ards have therefore been lowered or
sacrificed to met the current needs
of institutions.
'The large, best-equipped, and
well known schools naturally attract
the most desirable candidates, yet
not one OF them is exempt from the
necessity of admitting and keeping
in the school pupils of pitifully low
educational attainments and mental
ability in order that there may be
no disturbance or breakdown of the
system. which requires the hospital
to be manned at points through
out its departments with student
nurses"
Most student nurses are lacking In
two main respects-they are neither
old enough, nor well-educated
enough, to enter upon the course OF
training for the profession. Re-
gardiug age conditions, Miss Nutting
says: ssaFEE
Until the last few years the gen.
eral age requirement for admission
to training schools was twenty-three
years, and 1t was only in exceptional
instances that students were admit
ted under that age. But of recent
years, in the effort to secure enough
students to staff the hospitals, this
age requirement has been steadily
lowered until now in the majority
OF schools (55.2 per cent? students
are admitted at twenty years or un-
der, and in 1915 per cent of all
schools they are admitted at
eighteen years of age. A further
descent may be perhaps roreshad- !
owed in the record of the two schools
admitting that they receive stu
dents of sevnteen years of age.
"While there is little reason to
suppose that the age standard could
in the present day, be kept at
twenty-three or even twenty-five, yet
it is grave question whether the
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