R.N.s

If every man, woman and child in the U. S. were sick enough to need, and rich enough to employ, a private nurse at least one day each year, the 350,000 graduate nurses (R. N.s) would have steady year-round work. But there is by no means enough private nursing to go around. Last week the graduate nurses of the land set out to compel hospitals to hire them in place of student nurses. With no use for student nurses, hospitals would then have to discontinue their nursing schools. That, in turn, would compel the creation of independent, preferably university, nursing schools to supply trained nurses for both hospital and private practice.

Nurses were ready for the battle last week because the Committee on the Grading of Nursing Schools had completed an eight-year study, published its findings in Nursing Schools--Today & Tomorrow.

Most of "today's" 1,583 schools are adjuncts of hospitals. Most young women are attracted to them by the offer of free tuition and maintenance (board, lodging, laundry, telephone, etc.). "Nursing," tartly observed last week's report, ''is the only profession in which the student is usually maintained without cost to the family."

This is possible because the student nurse is a cheap slavey around a hospital. She scrubs floors, carries slops, makes beds, runs errands, does all the chores a housemaid might well do. Her education as a nurse is so meagre that her answers to examination papers are stock jokes among doctors.*

A training hospital, the nurses' committee believes, should have at least 100 patients a day. Half the U. S. training hospitals have less than 75 beds, and according to the survey, should be deprived of their schools. In fact, the survey insists that there are only a few dozen unquestionably good nursing schools in the U. S.

If the R. N.s could have their way, they would close up all hospital nursing schools and concentrate the teaching of their profession in such institutions as Yale's School of Nursing. But they realize that this is impossible. Hence the present campaign of the National League of Nursing Education is directed toward a stiff reduction in the number of hospital schools and a further increase in those connected with universities. Such a change, it is argued, would cut down the annual output of 25,000 new nurses to perhaps a few thousand a year. The graduate nurses, under this proposed system, would be better trained, more intelligent, more self-respecting.

As for the hospitals, the R. N.s insist, their budgets would not be increased by dispensing with their nursing schools and hiring graduate nurses at $50 a month and keep to do the bedside duties now performed by student nurses. For the menial duties of the student nurse the hospital would engage regular servants at $40 a month, the cost being offset by closing down its nursing school.

In principle the hospitals agree to this program but very few of them have as yet put it into practice.

The individual most likely to aid the nurses in their program is greying, matronly Effie Jane Taylor. R.N., B.S., M.A. (Hon.). Miss Taylor pioneered in the science of psychiatric nursing which she taught first at Johns Hopkins, and since 1923 at Yale. She is president of the National League of Nursing Education. Last June when Dean Annie Warburton Goodrich retired. Professor Taylor became dean of Yale's School of Nursing. Yale requires two years college work before admission to its nursing school. Students pay a tuition fee of $325 and emerge with a degree of Bachelor of Nursing. Graduates of this School have an outstanding chance of becoming head nurses in great hospitals.

* Samples: Question: Discuss emotional control. Answer: Emotional control is essential to a successful nurse because it depends on her emotions to control some one else. For instance, a man patient: it means so much for a nurse if she can control her emotions at all times. Question: What is asthma? Answer: A condition in which inspiration is easy and expiration impossible.

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