The Education of Nurses

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that the decade of the 1950s saw radical change in the "art" of nursing because nurses began to move from a servant to a partner role, to have more interaction with patients, to see innovations brought back from the previous military conflicts and to seek out more education to complete their transformation. The author points out that early nursing education was usually hospital-based; collegiate education for nursing did not take hold until the late 1940s and early 1950s and was mostly outside the control of formal educational institutions. The paper relates that, by the 1965, the American Nurses' Association proposed that nursing be divided into two education levels: Junior college (a two year degree) for technical or vocational practice and senior college (a four year degree) for professional practice.

From the Paper:

"Socioeconomic factors affecting the nursing profession during this decade reflected the transition of the American culture. Women, who enrolled in nursing programs in the 1940s, began to "retire" from the nursing profession. During WWII, young women were actively recruited to fill the stateside nursing shortage. This campaign was considered patriotic, and the move away from private duty nursing encouraged this (in addition to the acceptance of private health insurance as we know it). Nurses were an active combat component in the Korean War (while women cannot serve in combat roles, they did and still are in supportive roles that require them to be close to combat zones) but afterwards many nurses chose to start families and stay home. Also, the profession at one time had strict moral clauses, such as the young women could not be married, have children, dance, drink, be an atheist, and some of these old-fashioned ideals carried over into the new decade."

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