At Guy’s Hospital.
7. Guy’s Hospital for a long time generously provided for its superannuated sisters, but the plan in practice being found very objectionable, was a few years since given up, and the authorities established a Superannuation Fund for the Servants of the Hospital.
It is compulsory on sisters, optional to nurses, to belong to it. Each subscriber receives a book containing printed rules, with tables of rates of ages, payments, and pensions, and also blank leaves. The subscriber selects the amount of pension for which she wishes to subscribe. At each quarterly payment of wages, a proportion is paid into the fund; entered in the subscriber’s book, and properly attested; the hospital makes a payment of equal amount into the fund on the subscriber’s account. If the subscriber die before attaining the age when the pension begins, the amount paid by the subscriber is disposable by will, and in case of intestacy reverts to the next of kin. The pensions, one-half of which are thus purchased by the subscriber, and one-half presented by the hospital, vary, if I remember rightly, from £15 to £50. In February 1857, no nurse subscribed; to which three remarks apply:—first, that every good work takes time to grow; secondly, that not a few of the sisters, having looked forward to benefiting by the old system of superannuation, rather grudged their own payments than sought to induce their nurses to subscribe; thirdly, that many of the nurses were really unable to make the payment.
At the Non-Endowed Hospitals.
8. The non-endowed hospitals, I believe, but write from very imperfect information, grant few pensions. Sometimes they grant a gift of £25 or less to a retiring head-nurse. Sometimes they employ a head-nurse, become too old for her work, as an extra and inferior nurse. Sometimes they grant a worn-out head-nurse an asylum in the incurable ward of the hospital. I believe the pensions to old nurses are still fewer than the few to head-nurses. Definite information could easily be procured. Their funds do not permit such a diversion from their main and primary object, for which they are often, as it is, inadequate.
At County Hospitals.
9. Of the wages and prospects of eventual provision of the nurses of the county hospitals I know nothing; but understand that the former are lower than, and the latter as entirely blank as those of the nurses of the non-endowed London hospitals.
II. Desirability of some further Provision.
Unfitness of Nurses for any other work.