THE "ORDERLETTES."

Dominion, Volume 9, Issue 2734, 31 March 1916, Page 3

THE "ORDERLETTES."

WOMEN WORKERS IN THE MILITARY HOSPITALS. Among the creations of the war is the Orderlette (states the "Daily News"). She is winsome, energetic, and, as her name suggests, orderly, and her arrival is doing a great deal to produce a quiet revolution in tho administration of our military hospitals. To look at. the ordevm&te is only distinguished from the nurse by a badge on her arm. Very likely she is a refined and charming girl; yet when she is on duty between .the little rows of white beds you will find her performing, with a smiling face, those menial duties that only male orderlies would have done in days gone by. She came into existence sope months ago at the First London General Military Hospital, a giant institution with 1000 bods that stands amidst quite- curiously Flemish scenery on Wandsworth Common. And she has been such a success that the system is being rapidly adopted throughout tho country. "We have nearly a hundred women here doing work or various kinds that under peace conditions would ho done by men," Colonel Bruce Porter, the commandant of the hospital, told a "Daily News" representative. "And, be added, "lean say, after four months' experience, that they aro doing it remarkably well." The orderlotto is only a type: there are many other varieties of women hospital officials. Tho visiter's, or patient's, name, and the particulars about him, aro taken in the hall at _ Wandsworth by smart young ladies in smart sergo uniforms—the ward master's assistants. The hospital post office has a staff of four lady war workers,_ and the registrar's department, with its elaborate system of card indexing, is largely, run by women. Then there are women "staff clerks in Colonel Bruce Porter's'own office, a skilled woman assistant in the bacteriological laboratory, and v. omen to do nearly all the work in the steward s grocery store and tho quartermaster's linen store, where clean linen alone to the amount of between two and three thousand articles is idealt with each day. In this way numbers of men are being released to carry on the heavier work that also has to be done.