The benefit and provident societies embrace many objects: annuities, payments on illness, payments at burial, provision for children’s apprenticeships, provision for children at death, and other things.
Provision after Superannuation.
I. It appears to me that the main if not the only object of the Fund should be to provide annuities.
During Illness.
II. It would be a question whether or not to arrange for payments during illness.[23] Every now and then ward air gets down the throat of almost every nurse, and every few years or so there is an illness. In many cases a nurse’s pay stops either when or soon after she becomes a patient. Some check upon malingering, a thing well known where the name is not, is essential to every hospital. Of course it presses heaviest upon those who do not require it. After an illness, before returning into the wards, the best thing is a short thorough change of air. Often a severe illness is, and oftener still would be prevented by a week’s change of air, when the peculiar hospital-languor, so well known in hospitals, and so indescribable outside of them, first fairly sets in. The means of change of air, either before or after illness, are often deficient. Still, useful as some such provision would be, in many cases every year, it appears to me so subordinate to the great object of furnishing these women with some provision on their superannuation, that if it in the least impeded or rendered the latter less secure, I should unhesitatingly give it up.
Burial Payments.
III. With burial payments I think the Fund should have nothing to do.
Payments for Children.
IV. As to payments for children, whether on apprenticeship or at death:—Upon the whole, after much anxious thought, I think it undesirable to encourage mothers, as such. This is one of the many points, as to hospitals, where theories and experience differ much from each other.
Reasons against the last Form of Aid.