Report of the Working Party on the Recruitment and Training of Nurses.

Date:
1947
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Report of the Working Party on the Recruitment and Training of Nurses. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    11/132 (page 3)
    of medical research was not more than £500,000 a year—less than one-fifth of 1 per cent. of the total cost of sickness. Despite any increases that may have been made since, if the optimal level of research has not yet been reached, the require- ments of nursing can only be estimated in relation to a sickness burden which might be reduced. © } To some extent the long-term solution of the problem of staffing the nursing services lies in reducing the burden of sickness. This may mean investing more money in medical research, e.g., in gerontology, psychiatry, the study of tuberculosis, genetics and in other fields, and allocating larger funds to public health work in the preventive field, school nursing, improved nutrition, better housing, health education and preventive facilities generally. 21. The success of a National Health Service will depend as much on a sufficient supply of adequately trained nurses as on a sufficiency of doctors. In attempting to assess the numbers and quality required our task has not been made easier by the almost complete lack of reliable statistical data necessary to provide essential background information showing the composition and structure of the existing nursing profession. Such statistics as were available were at best inconclusive and at worst actually misleading. 22. Even the basic figure of the total numbers engaged in nursing could not be ascertained with any degree of accuracy, while figures relating to numbers in the various fields of nursing were equally uncertain. There are no means of finding out to what extent the Registers of nurses are “live” or not—i.e., what proportion of those whose names appear in the various Registers is in fact actively engaged in nursing. The position is further complicated by the fact that any one nurse’s name may appear on one or more of the Registers according to the qualifications she holds. Furthermore, there is no record of the age-groups or of socio-economic or education levels, or even of an individual nurse’s status in the profession. Such statistics as were available from the Ministry of Labour and National Service, Ministry of Health and Department of Health for Scotland did not appear to be systematised and in some instances were not even comparable. In our view is is essential to future organisation and planning that steps should be taken by the Health Departments to secure appropriate statistical returns from year to year. 23. In the absence of reliable figures we decided that a real effort must be made to provide a statistical background for our own and any succeeding investigations, to make it possible to detect the key problems and then formulate hypotheses for their solution. A great deal of fact finding had to be undertaken before we could even decide which were major and which minor problems, and which were not really problems at all. Hence the need for field work, as well as for the collection and analysis of a variety of data. 24, Fortunately, we have been enabled as a Working Party to pursue methods somewhat different from those normal to committee procedure. We have not taken formal evidence, whether oral or written, in the usual way. We have, of course, made informal contact with many of the bodies and organisations con- cerned in the recruitment, training and employment of nurses, but principally we have carried out our work in the field with the assistance of trained investigators placed at our disposal for the purpose. These field studies have involved direct contact with a substantial and repre- sentative sample of nurses of all ranks employed in all fields of the profession