Nurse Shortage Improvement Plan

Nurse Shortage Improvement Plan

2007

The history of nursing , a segment of the white collar service sector reflects the general trends in the transformation of work that gave rise to the new , dependent , salaried , white collar workforce , in conflict over the construct of professionalism . Nursing has evolved from the days of Florence Nightingale to a highly respected and educated profession (Melosh 32 . However , nowadays , disproportionate nurse to patient ratios continue to escalate . Increased occupational stress , job dissatisfaction , and burnout are contributing factors to increased attrition rates within the nursing profession

p A fine line separated the 19th-century nurse from the domestic servant as both were expected to perform household chores . By 1868 , however they were more clearly differentiated by salary the nurse earned 1 .00 to 2 .00 a day whereas the servant earned only 2 .22 per week (Reverby 9 . Because of the close association with dirty domestic work , few middle-class women entered nursing . Until the Civil War , nursing remained an occupation performed by poor , older , single women with no formal education or training . The post-Civil War years , characterized by remarkable economic growth , the rise of industrial corporations , the decline of small entrepreneurs , and the emergence of urban America engendered the expansion of relief organizations and the development of new charity organizations (Lubove 4-5 . One of the first training schools for nurses emerged in 1889 at the Johns Hopkins Hospital as a joint effort between the women reformers and the hospital trustees . They sought applications from Episcopalian and Presbyterian daughters of the clergy and the professions (James 214 . The reformers argued that only women with proper , virtuous backgrounds could enhance the moral atmosphere of the hospital (Reverby 37

During the 1930s and into the 1940s the private duty market collapsed altogether (Melosh 197 . The new array of hospital techniques for both patients and nurses fostered a new role for some nurses , however : that of hospital foreman , supervising a new hierarchy of subsidiary nurses The nursing professionalizers urged hospital administrators to hire educated graduate nurses of middle-class origins for these positions Administrators were not hard to persuade on this point since they were able to hire nurses with more education and experience for the same wage as the student nurse , given depression-era unemployment . At first grateful for work , graduate nurses accepted this condition . In time however , graduate nurses responded to this situation with unrest , high rates of absenteeism , and turnover . Conflicts between adherents of the more elitist , human capital interpretation of professionalism and proponents of the need to work continue to resonate from staff and head nurses today . Many staff nurses claim that besides taking care of patients , they 're working to put shoes on their children 's feet and nursing administrators just don 't see that they work to support their life outside the hospital too . Such a comment was just as appropriate in the 1880s as it was in 1995 . The same debates still rage on

Obviously , until the 20th century , hospital nursing was less prevalent than household nursing...