Blast from the Past: Feisty Former Chicagoan (1978) May 13, 2017

Primary Nursing: Hospitals bring back Florence Nightingale

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This article was one of the first in mainstream media about Primary Nursing, Marie Manthey .. and Florence Nightingale!

The picture on page 1 is so wonderful, isn’t it?

Here are some excerpts from the article, which you can see directly via the links at the top of this post.

“We’re not just dealing with inert lumps of flesh that hurt” Davis says. “We’re dealing with people’s emotional well-being, too. And that’s what makes nursing exciting again.”

Chicago Tribune: Sunday, February 2, 1978

by Joan Zyda

Sometime after World War II, the American registered nurse was forced into being less like Florence Nightingale and more like a factory foreman.

The shortage of nurses resulted in assembly-line nursing, which brought with it an assortment of nameless, often uncaring persons who trained for brief periods before being turned loose on patients. They were practical nurses, vocational nurses, technicians, orderlies, nurse’s aides, and nursing assistants.

If you’ve been in a hospital in the lst three decades, you have seen this production line in action. Somebody took your temperature, somebody else gave you a bath, somebody else took your blod pressure, somebody else brought in your food tray, somebody else …

Conducting this “orchestra” was, and still is, the chief duty of the registered nurse in most hospitals. Despite years of learning to care for sick people, she ends up in a supervisory job that takes her out of the mainstream of patient care. If she sees patients at all, it’s only briefly when she gives them a shot or a pill, or if there’s a “problem.”

“The patients are completely perplexed and often get irritable or depressed by this fragmented and impersonal care; it frights and frustrates the doctors; the morale of nurses sinks to an incredible low, resulting in a high turnover rate and absenteeism; and it has caused a decline in patient care at many hospitals,” says Dr. William Shaffrrath, diretor of the National Joint Practice Commission in Chicago.

The commission was set up in 1972 by the American Medical Association and the American Nurses Association to solve the growing dissatisfaction with hospital nursing care.

Teh solution, with which the commission has been shaking the pillars of medicine, is to put the registered nurse back at the patient’s bedside, where she can use her training. Some hospitals have already done this, including Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center, University of Chicago Hospitals, Good Samaritan Hospital in Downers Grove, and Evanston Hospital.

“Most nurses we talked to are frustrated. They don’t want to be supervisors,” Schaffrath says. “They prefer hands-on nursing in the Florence Nightingale tradition. They want to walk cot to cot, tending to and cheering on the patients.”

Schaffrath credits Marie Manthey, 42, a fiesty former Chicagoan and now vice president of patient services at Yale-New Haven Hospital in Connecticut, for blowing the whistle on nursing. She has advocated for the “return to the bedside” alternative in articles in several prominent medical journals.

As a registered nurse for 22 years, Manthey has had an inside look at the failings of her profession.

“Registered nurses have become faceless people, and it’s the system’s fault,” she says. “Nursing has become extremely production-oriented with very little concern for human needs. Most nurses are embarrassed about that. They say, almost apologetically, ‘Well, I’m just a staff nurse,’ which equates to, ‘I’m just a housewife.’

“But if nurses got their identity back,” Manthey says, “they’d be a proud people again. Then they’d be saying, ‘Hey, wait a minute. I am a staff nurse. I am an important person.”

“Nurses are supposed to be in the thick of things,” Manthey says firmly.

Manthey has coined her remedy, “Primary Nursing” a system whose main goal is just that — to get the nurse to provide total nursing care to a patient during their hospitalization. That means the same nurse does all the work for a patient from admission to discharge.

“The Nurse and the Patient get to know each other,” Manthey says.

With Primary Nursing, the nurse takes over many tasks she used to assign her aides.. because they’re all relevant to patient care.”

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For further content from this article, see clipping number 2, and/or let us know if you’d like us to post further excerpts here.

Isn’t it amazing to look back and remember the days when Nursing was at that factory-process level??