In early 1924, the 2 February issue of Nursing Times was concerned about training in small hospitals. The lead story warned that the proper training of probationers – an old name for student nurses – in “small infirmaries is a great and increasing difficulty”. It highlighted, as an example, the…
After last year’s focus on 1948 and the months following the NHS’s creation, in 2024 we will look back to 100 years ago to discover what was being covered by Nursing Times in 1924. At the start of January 1924, five years had passed since the end of the First World…
Government policy on the healthcare workforce and how it was being communicated to the NHS was causing an element of confusion for nurses in December 1948. Marjorie Wenger, then editor of Nursing Times, attempted to provide some clarity on the matter in an article in the edition dated 4 December.…
Nurse pay is never far from the headlines in the nursing press and the same was true in the autumn of 1948, when debate centred on setting salary scales in the NHS, which was just a few months old. In her lead article in the 6 November issue of that year,…
Concerns about the financial pressures facing student nurses and newly qualified staff, along with the negative impact these have on workforce retention, are never far from the headlines. Just last month, an influential health think tank recommended that nurses’ student debt should be cleared after 10 years’ service to tackle the…
This month’s issue of Nursing Times is focused on the theme of education – and so was the edition published on 4 September 1948. Under the headline ‘Nursing school’, the magazine’s editor of the time, Marjorie Wenger, reviewed approaches and challenges to nurse education, past, present and future. She started…
Unhappiness about the levels of pay received by nurses, especially students, and their attempts to improve them via the administrative machinery of the time hit the headlines in the summer of 1948. The NHS had been in existence for barely a month by the time Nursing Times published its issue,…
