From starched caps to scrubs, the changing face of nursing
Staff recreate picture from 91 years ago – at the same hospital
IN their traditional starched caps and aprons, a group of nurses pose with their formidable looking matron in 1927.
Now, after the old photograph taken at Sandwell Hospital was discovered in a broom cupboard, health workers have recreated it to mark the NHS’s 70th anniversary today.
The changing face of their profession is plain to see. Gone, for example, are the nurses’ caps for keeping hair neatly in place and like those used by Florence Nightingale in the 19th century.
The caps went out of fashion in the 1990s over fears they would attract bacteria. Another difference is the present day nurses mainly wear trousers.
And while those pictured 91 years ago were all women, reflecting the then prevailing view of nursing as a ‘woman’s job’, a man is among the ranks of their 21st century successors.
The original photograph was taken at Sandwell Hospital’s headquarters in West Bromwich in 1927, when it was known as Hallam Hospital. Back then it specialised in the treatment of infectious disease.
The nurses from yesteryear were lined up outside the nurses’ home, which had just been added to the hospital that year. Typically, after a long day’s work they had to be back in the nurses’ home by 10pm. Matron was in ‘loco parentis’.
Back in 1927, George V was on the throne, Stanley Baldwin was Prime Minister and it was a time of great medical advances, with new vaccines for diphtheria, whooping cough and tuberculosis.
But nursing was still in its early years of professionalism. Throughout the 19th century and into the 20th, teaching schools for nurses were responsible for setting their own standards for training.
It was only after the College of Nursing (now the Royal College of Nursing) was founded in 1916 that parliament was persuaded to bring in regulation. Now, it is an all-degree profession – all student nurses are educated at university. Since the 1960s and 70s, the boundary between the work of doctors and nurses has shifted, too. Nurses began to undertake complex clinical assessments, diagnosed illness, prescribed treatment and designed plans of care, unheard Another which of difference in the would 1920s. over have the been last seven decades is that health care workers from abroad have become increasingly vital to Britain, with targeted overseas recruitment starting in the 1930s. In 1949, the RCN worked with the government to launch campaigns to recruit hospital staff from the Caribbean and Europe, particularly Ireland. It is estimated that by 1965, 35 per cent per cent of nursing staff in Britain were born overseas. Fourteen staff at Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust recently posed in a similar line-up to that from 1927 to recreate the photo. Among them was ward manager Avnash Nanra. She said: ‘The old picture is truly amazing. You can clearly see how things have changed over the years.’