Convalescent Home—“The Rest.”
The staff, which in the beginning consisted of two nurses, my friend and myself, has been increased until it is now large enough to answer calls from the sick anywhere in the boroughs of Manhattan and the Bronx, and the calls in the year 1913-14 came from nearly 1,100 more patients than the combined total of those treated during the same period in three of the large hospitals in New York—a comparison valuable chiefly as measuring the growing demand of the sick for the visiting nurse.
The service, though covering so wide a territory, is capable of control and supervision. The division into districts, with separate staffs for contagious and obstetrical cases, may be compared to the hospital division into wards. Like the hospital, it has a system of bedside notes, case records, and an established etiquette between physicians, nurses, and patients. Those that can best be cared for in the hospitals are sent there, the sifting process being accomplished by the doctors and nurses working together. Approximately ten per cent. of our patients are sent to the hospitals.
Serious nurses are gratified that the former casual and almost sentimental attitude of the public toward them and their work has been replaced by a demand for standards of efficiency.
Enthusiasm, health, and uncommon good sense on the part of the nurse are essential, for without the vision of the importance of their task they could not long endure the endless stair-climbing, the weight of the bag, and the pulls upon their emotions.
There has been an extraordinary development of the visiting-nurse service throughout the country since we began our rounds, and the practical arguments for sustaining such work would seem irresistible. It requires imagination, however, to visualize the steady, competent, continuous routine so quietly performed, unseen by the public, and its financial support is the more precarious because there can be no public reminder of its existence by impressive buildings and monuments of marble.
CHAPTER III
THE NURSE AND THE COMMUNITY
The work begun from the top floor of the tenement comprised, in simple forms, those varied lines of activity which have since been developed into the many highly specialized branches of public health nursing now covering the United States and engaging thousands of nurses.[2]