Care of the sick and injured was brought from the home, to the hospitals, military hospitals, and the battlefield. Reform was necessary. Dorothea Dix was appointed as superintendent of women nurses by in the Union Army. She was instrumental in planning new hospitals, and led the supervision of nursing programs. Dorothea Dix led under the nursing principles from Florence Nightingale.
The career of a Registered Nurse resorts back to the history from which it derived. Becoming a Registered Nurse requires an established career in healthcare helping improve the aspect of the lives of everyone. Nursing originally derived from the medieval era when nuns exercised their assistance to medical practitioners for injured Christian Warriors. The basics of nursing education were outlined by Florence Nightingale during the arrival of the Crimean War. In great detail she wrote a book entitled “Notes on Nursing” that explained the duties and subjections of a nurse.
Before nurses came around family members took care of one another. People was also known as a “wet nurse” was hired to breastfeed babies. In Europe when people had the plague and other deadly diseases, Nuns risked their life to take care of them. Woman from the upper-class made nursing a paid profession, they are called Florence nightingale. During the time of the Civil War nurses was needed for the injured soldiers.
Florence Nightingale managed to establish nursing as a respectable and reputable profession. When the Crimea war started, through the Minister of war Sidney Herbert who was known to her, sent her with a team of 38 women to manage the barrack Hospital in Scutari. There she observed that the sanitary conditions among other things were very bad. Through her effort and hard work they managed to reduce the case fatality from 32% to 2% which is a significant drop. Four years after returning to England she started the Nightingale Training School for nurses at St Thomas Hospital in London.
Even though the hospital was a living nightmare, Nightingale and the nurses made it work. One of Nightingale’s major contributions during the Crimean War was the way she recorded and organize her patients’ statistics. Nightingale came up with a chart called the Nightingale rose diagram. By the time that she left Scutari, the place where the Crimean War was taking place, the mortality rate for soldiers declined drastically. After the war, Nightingale had two goals in mind: the reform of army sanitary practices and the establishment of a nurse training school at St. Thomas’s Hospital in London (Houlihan, 5).
Florence Nightingale, named after the city of Florence, was born in Florence, Italy, on May 12, 1820. She would pursue a career in nursing and later find herself studying data of the soldiers she so cringingly looking after. Born into the Crimean War, Florence Nightingale took the lead role amongst her and her colleges to improve the inhabitable hospitals all across Great Britten; reduce the death count by more than two-thirds. Her love for helping people didn’t go unnoticed and would continue to increase throughout her life. In 1860 she opened up the St. Tomas’ Hospital and the Nightingale Training School for Nurses before passing August 13, 1910 in London.
As I researched this career It brought more questions to my life. It became a big interest that soon I would have an opportunity to answer my own questions obviously with the help of others. Registered nurses came through a long way back to the 19th century, when they used to provide care to the injured soldiers and other injures strangers. Florence Nightingale was the first influenced in this career. She was a daughter of a British family who worked her life to improve the field of nursing.
She was a very religious woman and an English nurse that worked to improve the poor conditions of her time by helping out her community and improving and maintaining the health of society (Wikipedia). She wrote a book called, “Notes on Nursing,” in which she layed down the profession and key points of the profession (Self Growth). She is considered the most influential person in the development of nursing. One of the biggest developments in the nursing career came about from Florence Nightingale: the Nightingale Training School of 1860 for Nurses, in which students would go off after graduating and travel all around the world helping others out and giving them the care that was needed (Self Growth). Apart from Florence Nightingale, there were many more developments within the career field of nursing.
Throughout most of history the perception of a nurse was interpreted as a bedside maid that served the doctor they worked under. However, nurses have defined, implemented, and birthed evidence based practice for over a hundred years (What’s, 2011). The application of evidence-based practice nursing care is concurrent with the effect on improved patient outcomes (Davis, 2016). The evidence based practice has evolved into a need for health care power teams that work together to continuously research the best outcomes for the patients in their care as a unit (Kerr,2007). Furthermore, the trinity relationship that exists between research, evidence-based practice, and quality control work behind the scenes to produce a decline in errors with patient’s
A registered nurse is a critical piece of the support system for injured and sick patients. Nurses are greatly valued in the health care system because they have many and varied responsibilities within hospitals and clinics, including: patient care, administration of medications; communication with other health care providers, patients and patients’ families; and education of patients, family members, and new nurses in training (Isaac, 2014). Nursing is one of the oldest professions and was originally centered at the patient’s home. The first hospital was built in 1751 in Philadelphia, but it was, at that time, not well thought of as a place to provide safe health care. Hospitals were known as asylums or poorhouses until the Civil War.