PEDIATRICS Vol. 3 No. 1 January 1949, pp. 107-108
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PUBLIC HEALTH, NURSING AND MEDICAL SOCIAL WORK

NURSING OR NURSES?

Editors: LEONA BAUMGARTNER, M.D..

We doubt that there is a pediatrician in our country who can have failed to be concerned about the difficulty in securing nursing care today for its patients. Adequate care in hospitals, schools, homes, physicians offices, industrial plants is frequently not available; and many new services cannot even be begun because of the general inability to secure nurses. These facts have been the subject of several detailed studies by the nursing profession in recent months. The one of greatest importance and interest probably is "Nursing for the Future" prepared by Dr. Esther Lucile Brown for the National Nursing Council and published by the Russell Sage Foundation. Dr. Brown is an anthropologist who has studied carefully two other professions—social work and the law.

Two years of study of services given by nurses and the education they receive throughout the United States, and the cooperation of over two thousand physicians, administrators, nurses, and lay persons gave Dr. Brown the background from which she has written a most challenging book—one which needs the careful consideration of all those who are interested in the improvement of health in this country.

The role of the nurse in modern society and the education she should have is studied in an objective manner. The complexity of the problem is emphasized. The need for different types of skills is recognized. The work usually performed by "the nurse" is analyzed somewhat in the manner found useful in England when the lack of manpower was a problem of primary concern to the war effort. The job to be done is "de-skilled," as the English put it, that is, analyzed to see what functions can be performed only by professionally skilled persons and what functions can be relegated to those less skilled. Dr. Brown shifts the emphasis from "nurses" to "nursing." She points out that "so long as attention is centered on the graduate nurse, no other avenue is open except that of the present frantic and probably futile effort to recruit more prospective R.N.'s.