Soapbox
Helen Calabretto
School of Nursing, University of South Australia, SA
PP: 195 - 196
Article Text
The 'good old days'?
I teach nurses at the tertiary level and am constantly hearing remarks from within and external to the profession, such as:
It's not the same as the good old days.
They don't make nurses like they used to.
I don't know what 'they' mean. My memories of nursing are long: some 35 plus years. I have formed many friendships along the journey. I have positive and negative reminders of the days, weeks, months and years of the past.
Times when nurses worked for too many hours for far too little financial reward; changes of roster which occurred with minimal or no negotiation; holidays which were allotted or bargained for; requests for time off were granted only for special reasons that had to be explained (or lied about) in great detail prior to any consideration. One lived in a nurses 'home', shared a room with strangers, was locked in after 11 pm and castigated for showing any public signs of attraction to either sex.
As well as working long hours, all study was undertaken in one's own time, apart from preliminary training school and final 'blocks'. Lectures were attended immediately after a night on duty or in the afternoon on a busy shift. Notes were not provided by lecturers. Films, VCRs and audiotapes are relatively recent innovations. Textbooks were dull and few scholarly journals with nursing content existed prior to the late 1970s.
On the wards, it seemed nurses did everything from cooking, cleaning, caring, counselling, making enema soap, scraping trolley wheels, cutting old bed linen into strips suitable for cleaning cloths, folding endless piles of linen from the laundry, ensuring rubber draw sheets and catheters were dry prior to reuse, making cotton wool balls, cutting gamgee rolls into wound dressings, folding gauze, boiling syringes and thermometers, burning arms and hands whilst retrieving instruments from hot water sterilizers, testing urine over a Bunsen burner - and, oh yes, looking after patients!
In theatre the 'junior' nurse had to check every glove (every finger of every glove) for patency after each glove had been dried, powdered and turned inside out!
There were no ward clerks in my 'good old training days' so phone answering was a nursing 'job', as was preparing all the papers for medical records and 'colouring in' the antibiotics on temperature charts.
Disposable equipment and materials were a revolution when they arrived. However, economic constraints determined who had what, when, and for which patients. Medical areas somehow fared less well than 'glamorous' surgery, paediatrics or obstetrics.
Visitors were strictly monitored, irrespective of illness/wellness level. The dying were 'not allowed' to have visitors out of hours except for the chaplain or senior nursing staff.
Decubitus ulcers were seen more often. Turning orderlies, lifting teams and back care education didn't feature in the 'good old days'. Wound infections seemed more common. Patients stayed in bed for days postoperatively or postpartum and there were no occlusive dressings or staples which allow for hygiene and toileting.
Uniforms were stiff, inflexible layers of collars, aprons, belts, moveable stud buttons, thick heavy stockings, and no jewellery, hair ribbons or coloured pins.
Areas such as intensive care, coronary care, special care nursery, high dependency unit, nurse special units are innovations in my time. Nursing has changed over time; improved in terms of conditions, care and education. Let us rejoice in our improvements, celebrate the achievements, encourage tertiary education and support the students. The good old days cannot be resurrected, neither should they be. Let us all be positive for the future rather than yearn for a past, most of which was negative for nursing and for which there were few rewards.
Rosemary Keenan RN RN BAppSci(Nsg)
GradDipHltbSc(Adv Nsg) GradDipArts(Couns) GradCertEd ERCNA
Nursing's new cultural revolution
Emerging within Australian nursing, there is what seems to amount to the formation of a reactionary movement. Whether orchestrated or spontaneous, nurse academics are confronted with a situation which has the potential to cause the theory-practice divide-that time honoured facet of nurse education which of late appeared to be narrowing- to widen into chasm.
Nurse academics are now, it seems, to be encouraged to undergo some form of 'periodic ritual humiliation' in which, for their own good, they must return to their roots and refresh themselves in the fountains of 'hands on' nursing. Practical knowledge is valued above all else and academics have somehow strayed too far from the path of nursing righteousness and must be reoriented to the true skills-based foundations of nursing.
If it were not so frightening, an analogy with the Chinese Cultural Revolution, if not in scale, would be ridiculous. And yet...and yet...was that too not a movement sparked by non-academics who knew beyond doubt that university lecturers had gone so far beyond manual labour that they must be reoriented to the plough and the foundry? Were there not functionaries who took it upon themselves to bring academics down a peg or two? And did this not lead to dislocation in the advancement of knowledge?
Fellow nurse academics, while pondering this burgeoning re-education process, may wish to consider that a likely effect is to bring the progress of nursing within a university context to a shuddering halt. But then, a cynic might suggest, that might be the not too hidden agenda; after all we are only nurses. Our clinical colleagues may not number Luddites amongst them, but some of us remain to be convinced.
Andrew Crowther RN RPN MA CertEd RNT
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