The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1912-05-21
EDUCATIONAL STATUS OF NURSES

Conditions making for inefftciency 1 in schools for the professional train ing of nurses are dealt with in a bulletin entitled .'The Educational Status of NursinS,' which is shortly to be issued for free distribution by the United States Bureau of Educa- ton. According to the bulletin, there are schools which admit, candidates at as early an age as IT. asking no educational qualifications except a common-school education. and some- times not even that. Other training schools require as much as, 12 hours a day of nursing from their students in addition to attendance at classes and lectures. Not in frequently, also. the students are subjected to certain forms of commercial exploitation. These conditions exist, notwithstand- ing a. number of advances made in recent years in the professional train ing of nurses. The bulletin is writ ten by Miss M. Adelaide Nutting. di- rector of the Department of Nursing and Health, Teachers College, Colum- bia University, New York. and for merly Superintendent of Nurses and Principal of the Training School of Johhs Hopkins, Hospital, Baltimore. The first count in Miss Nutting's in- dictment of nurses training schools reads in the Government publication as follows:
 '.The condition in 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 country with the consequent unrestricted de- velopment of training schools as a
 part of their working organization,
 has led to a very large demand for students essentially for utilitarian pur-
 poses. No adequate supply could be
 secured through the usual sources
 with the maintenance of suitable
 standards, and such standards have therefore been lowered or sacrificed
 to meet the current needs of institu-
 tions.e
 "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 educa-
 tionaI attachments and mental ability
 in order that there may be no dis
 turbance or breakdown of the sys-
 tenn which requires the hospital to be
 manned at all points throughout 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 this profession Regard
 ing age conditions, Miss Nutting says:
 Until the last few years the gen.
 eral age requirement for admission to
 training schools was 23 years, and it
 was only in exceptional instances that
 students were admitted under that
 age But of recent years, in the eff
 fort to secure enough students to staff
 the hospital, this age requirement has
 been steadily lowered until now in the
 majority of schools (55.2 per cent.)
 students are admitted at 20 years of
 under. and in 1915 per cent. of all
 schools they are admitted at IS years
 of age. A further descent may be
 perhaps foreshadowed in the record of the two schools admitting that