Ladysmith news-budget. [volume] (Ladysmith, Rusk County, Wis.) 1907-1927, 1916-05-12
WISCONSIN WILL TRAIN
ITS COMMUNITY NURSES
School for Special Work in Public
Health and Social Service to be
Established in Milwaukee

A training school, for public health
nurses, one of the first in the coun-
try, is to be established in Wiscon-
sin by the Wisconsin Anti-Tuberculo-
sis Association with the cooperation
of the University of Wisconsin Elk
tension Division, the Milwaukee Wis
iting Nurse Association, the City
Health Department, the Medical,
Nursing and Truancy Departments of
Public Schools, the Associated Chart
ties, the Juvenile Protective Assoc.a-
ton, the Central Council of Social
Agencies, Muirdale Sanitorium, the
County Rural Visiting Nurses and
other Milwaukee organizations and
social service workers who are deeply
impressed with the need for such a
school and who will assist il train
ing the students.
Plans for the opening Of the school
are incomplete, but at an enthusiastic
dorsement was given the tentative
course Of study as it has been out
lined by Miss Katherine Olmsted, R.
N, graduate Of John Hopkins, and
a public health nurse of unusual ex-
perlence who was secured by the
Wisconsin Anti-Tuberculosis Associa-
ton this spring for the special pur-
pose Of working out a plan whereby
Wisconsin will train it's own public
workers to meet the ever increasing
demand. In the outlining of the
course, Miss Olmsted has had the adj
vice of the Milwaukee workers who
will assist in providing the practical
field for the student nurses.
The fact that the public health
nurse is generally the pioneer social
service worker in a community, es-
pecially a small one, and that she is
called upon to be truancy officer, pro
baton officer, family relations ex-
pert, and to deal with problems Of
poverty, crime, and industry as a
part of her work in protecting the
community from disease, makes it
necessary to supplement- the present
hospital training, designed to fit it's
graduates for private bedside nurs-
ing, with the practical field work
that will bring the worker into init
mate personal touch with the vari
Gus and closely interrelated phases of
community conditions which enter in
to the problems which the nurse
must seek to solve. Many of the
public health nurses now in the field
have been forced to go into the work
without this special training because
it has been unavailable. They have
been forced to develop their work
step by step, out of their own eXper-
fence, a hard school which has given
the state some splendid community
nurses, but in which also there have
been some failures that might have
been turned to success under exper-
fenced guidance.
Many of the nurses now in the
field, as we'll as student nurses, anX-
ious to take up the work, feel the
need of the course which is under
consideration and are planning to
take advantage of it.. One of it's OBJ
jects will be- to standardized the pub
lie health nursing service throughout
the state, thus increasing the eff
cheney of the individual workers, in
surfing the highest grade of service
to the community, and of so organ
izing the profession that there will
be more definite recognition both of
what the community has a right to
demand from it's public health nurse
and of what the nurse has a right to
expect from the community