UCC SONM 25 Year Book

UCC / School of Nursing and Midwifery

Student Nurses from Saint Xavier University School of Nursing and Health Sciences paid a visit to the School of Nursing and Midwifery, BHSC, UCC 2019

Community/Public Health Nursing - Origins to 2019

Dr. Helen Mulcahy

EVOLUTION OF COMMUNITY NURSING

Community nursing in Ireland evolved in the 19 th century from the work of individual religious orders in providing nursing care in the home setting. Efforts for more widespread organisation of community nursing services stemmed from the Queen’s Institute of District Nursing in the 1890s. This was a branch of the Queen Victoria Jubilee Institute for District Nursing in the UK. Nurses who were trained by this organisation became known as ‘Jubilee Nurses’ a term which persisted right up the 1970s and 1980s. On completion of their training, ‘Jubilee Nurses’ were recruited to districts who could afford to house and pay them and their work was governed by voluntary district nursing associations. Another voluntary initiative called the Lady Dudley scheme was set up in the poorest parts of Ireland (mainly Connaught), in 1903 by the wife of the Irish Viceroy, Lady Rachel Dudley. Nurses funded under this scheme were called ‘Lady Dudley Nurses’. Both Jubilee and Lady Dudley nurses lived in their areas and dealt with all the nursing needs of their populations, albeit initially curative rather than preventative care. It was a precondition that the voluntary district nursing committees have organised accommodation for a nurse before she could be recruited to a district. More often than not these accommodations were two roomed cottages where the front room could double as a dispensary or surgery. In other cases, the nurse lived over the existing dispensary building which was also used by the local GP.

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