Nurses & Purses

Nursing has become an overcrowded profession, not because of a dearth of sick people to attend, but because of purses too slim to pay for nursing services, and because of too many nurses. The average private nurse works less than eight months a year. Her average income for the whole year is about $1,800. or $35 weekly. Nonetheless, the nursing schools threw into the surfeited market 20,000 girls last June, four times the number of young doctors graduated from the medical schools at the same time.

The question of how to improve the nursing business occupied the directorate of the American Nurses' Association who met in Manhattan last week. The Association has a membership of 105,000 graduate nurses. They demand stabilization of their haphazard, part-time employment.

One effort which the organization will make will be to curtail the number of schools for nurses. Another will be to make requirements for graduation stricter than ever. Probationers will be required to spend less time with their beaux and more time with their books, pots and mops before they may change the blue uniform of the student for the white uniform of the graduate nurse.

Another effort, already under way, is to find more employment for nurses. Special and general hospitals have more than their complements of nurses. But mental and contagious hospitals are understaffed, largely because nurses dislike mentally deranged persons and fear contagious work. Pressure of unemployment may change such attitudes.

Then there are multitudes of the "white-collared" class, who cannot afford private nurses and who cannot endure the nursing of free medical services. Elnora E. Thompson, president of the Nurses' Association, last week called white-collar folk "the greatest unnursed group of a community." To meet the needs of such "unnursed," the nurses are experimenting with service by the hour. Although the nurse thus is relegated to the catch-as-catch-can employment of an apartment housemaid, she may earn a maximum of $2 or $3 an hour.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.