NURSING

Nursing



Nursing

Introduction

Competent nursing has been central to the care of people with disabilities for many centuries. Up until the nineteenth century, people who were sick or disabled because of old age, mental illness, or physical disability were usually cared for by their families at home. For the poor sick and destitute, institutional care existed in local charitable guest- or poor houses. Professional nursing care by skilled nurses who were paid for their work, either in these institutions or through visiting nursing associations, grew during the nineteenth century. At that time, patterns of living and the provision of health care changed as a result of broader social changes, such as industrialization, urbanization, and changing work and gender relationships.(Nursing Research and Practice, 2010)

Nursing Orders

Nurses' role in care for the sick and disabled originated in religious orders, founded at the time of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Women and men who joined religious orders actively devoted themselves to poor relief and care for the sick.They viewed the care they provided as part of their religious practice and learned nursing skills through apprenticeship. With the foundation of the Daughters of Charity in France in 1633, cofounders Vincent de Paul and Louise de Marillac set a remarkable example of organized nursing care by lay women. The Daughters of Charity gained enormous social respect.(Journal of Trauma Nursing, 2010) Religious calling and spiritual commitment to God legitimized their role.So strong was the example that Roman Catholics and Protestants alike adapted to this model, and charitable nursing orders spread over Europe and North America through the next centuries, reaching a peak in the Evangelical and Missionary religious revival movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Within a broader nineteenth-century humanitarian reform movement, previously unspecified groups of socially marginalized poor and disabled people were differentiated into distinct categories. Separate institutions emerged, for example, for the care of the sick and incurables, for insane persons, and for prisoners. In the new capitalist and industrial world, the emerging middle classes became concerned about the growing numbers of poor, which they perceived to be a source of social instability, fueled by fears of dirt, poverty, and contagious disease. In the New World, massive immigration created its own problems. Reform-minded middle-class citizens sought new and supposedly more effective ways to help the poor through rational control and scientific efficiency. Establishing good nursing care was one of them. Numerous associations for care of the sick emerged, who involved themselves with care of the sick in institutions, but some also provided care for people in their own homes.

Modeled after Roman Catholic sisterhoods and brotherhoods, the Protestants revived the function of the deacons and deaconesses. In 1836, Pastor Theodor Fliedner established one of the most well-known associations for care of the sick and dependent, the Deaconess Institute in Kaiserswerth, Germany. Within the protected structure of a motherhouse, the institute trained both nurses and teachers to work in its facilities. The work of deaconess nurses was not limited to care of physically sick or disabled ...