“In the context of health care, the idea of care has two principal meanings: (1) taking care of the sick person, which emphasizes the delivery of technical care, and (2) caring for or caring about the sick person, which suggests a virtue of devotion or concern for the other as a person. At times these two aspects of care have been united; at other times, they have been in conflict.” (Reich, 2014, Vol. 2, pp. 489-495). This point emphasizes the importance of nurses in the health care domain and how nurses struggled to change the perspective of the field.
The evolution of nursing is marked by its beginning in the early centuries and its development from that time till now. It was followed …show more content…
During the war nurses were needed at the front lines. At that time, there were neither trained nurses nor nursing school. The term nursing was referring to women who followed their husband or son to the war to take care of them or some volunteer. These women went to the war with their own basic knowledge caring of loved ones. The work performed by the women at the civil war changed the perception of women working outside home. The women realized that they should have a formal education to care about patients. After the civil war, there were a migration from the eastern and southern Europe to the United State. Due to their new arrival, they did not have sufficient equipment to cure themselves when they were ill. They were seeking care in the municipal almshouses. Nurses in the municipal almshouses were provided by the city courts. They were prostitute who were given the choice of going to prison or hospital service. To avoid going to prison they chose to go to work in the hospital. From the civil war till that time nursing was still not a profession. Nurses were not getting any education to do their work. Later, some physicians came up with the idea that nursing care will be best deliver by persons who had received a formal education, (Egenes, n.d., chap. 1, pp. …show more content…
Although women fought hard to professionalize the field, it was still facing some problem. The nursing schools established during that period were attached to hospitals. Nursing students at that period were in hospital cleaning, doing laundry. Student nurses were not paid at all. During that period, many organizations were established such as the American Society of Superintendents of Training Schools for Nurses in 1893, the Nurses ' Associated Alumnae of United States and Canada in 1897; the latter renamed the American Nurses Association in 1911, and the first nursing Act was established in North Carolina, New Jersey, Virginia, and New York in 1903. In 1920, a study was made by Rockefeller Foundation advocating that nursing schools should be independent of hospitals, and should have financial support. In the period of the Great Depression in the United States, the employment of nurses diminished. It led to the decline of the number of nursing schools. During the World War II, the need of nurses increased again. Those needed nurses were still trained in hospital-based programs, (Jackson,