CARE OF NURSES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 24 June 1938, Page 4

CARE OF NURSES

SAFEGUARDS OF HEALTH IN WELLINGTON. STATEMENT BY MEDICAL SUPERINTENDENT. (By Telegraph —Press Association.) WELLINGTON, June 23. An outline of the precautions taken to protect the health of nurses in the Wellington Hospital was given by the Medical Superintendent. Dr A. R. Thorne, today. The greatest risk occurred where tubercular and diphtheria cases were being nursed, he said, but the special measures taken kept the incidence of infection comparatively low. Every care was taken to see that probationers were healthy on admission and afterwards, and a course of physical culture was used to remedy minor physical defects. The hospital had introduced the Mantoux test, which had recently been initiated in large hospitals overseas, to guard against tubercular infection. This test proved whether or not the trainee had been infected and enabled the hospital to separate the comparatively immune from the non-infected, and therefore susceptible cases, during a two years’ test. There had been a minor manifestation of an epidemic of diphtheria amongst the nurses in 1937, due to several being carriers. Inoculation had been carried out and all trainees entering the hospital were now tested and immunised if necessary. Only a few cases had since developed amongst nurses attending particularly virulent cases of the disease.