The Bay of Plenty Beacon Published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. MONDAY, NOV. 18, 1946 SHORTAGE OF NURSES

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 10, Issue 51, 18 November 1946, Page 4

The Bay of Plenty Beacon Published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. MONDAY, NOV. 18, 1946 SHORTAGE OF NURSES

THE desperate position which will obtain shortly at the Whakatane Hospital unless the nursing staff can be built up was emphasised by Dr. Dawson at Thursday’s meeting of the Board. The warning was unmistakeable. It is high time a far greater percentage of public interest was taken in this very vital problem. It is not a local problem—it is country-wide. There is greater competition for labour today in the ranks of employerdom than ever before in this country. Certainly new industries have partly led to this competition, but if so the result itself is due, not to the disposition of workers so much as to the very nature of industrial capitalism, the units of which automatically outbid each other for labour and trade. Farmers until recently complained of this very thing, but the whole community now feels the effect in such instances as the very inadequate staffing of hospitals. There seems to be one obvious remedy in this case. It is said that for more than a decade the maternity hospitals will remain unequal to the country’s needs. Private homes of the kind have been decreasing, one reason being that nurses are unobtainable, and another that the authorities are insisting on an advanced technique for which existing homes have not yet been adapted. It is no use trying to undo the new developments. Women, for instance, have in the past decade invaded occupations previously a male monopoly to a most remarkable extent. They also have entered the new types of occupation at least on a numerical parity with men. There are perhaps two ways in which this change might be partly reversed, one being the unwelcome eventuality of an economic depression, and the other, and the really reasonable one of improving both the remuneration and conditions in female occupations where personnel is not now adequate. In the particular case of nursing, there is training to be considered, and conditions and salary ought to be improved from the outset so that other occupations may not continue their present all too successful competition with the nursing profession. This is a career rightly to be held in honour, but if public authorities, whether national or local, expect merely this sentimental estimate to be a sufficient inducement, young women will be shrewd enough to suspect exploitation. In former generations, indeed, the present commotion was conspicuously absent, because the pioneer women were far more adaptable than those of today, and a surprisingly large proportion of them did not disdain the idea of being a potential mid-wife should there be an emergency. Nor did the country thereby suffer any relative loss of population. It therefore appears as if the present situation could be met by a policy of greater adaptability, making the best of existing facilities, encouraging their maintenance in a practical way, and leaving in abeyance demands for any ultra modern technique such as was unknown when the population had a faster rate of increase than it has now.