Jane Yeadon

Jane Yeadon

‘So- what would qualify you to be a good nurse?’

Today’s answer must surely be a little different from when I was having an interview fifty years ago. Recalling experience as a ward maid in the local cottage hospital, I said I’d been fond of a patient who’d been a shepherd. When he died, I’d wished I’d been involved in looking after him with the knowledge to do so and properly.

I must have passed that test. It was a time when nursing was a career ideal for the more practically – inclined school leaver. A strong stomach, stout constitution, satisfactory interview with the hospital matron and ability to pass a fairly simple exam would clinch the beginning of a three-year training period.

Then, I’d never thought that those heady 1960s days would become history. Not that there was huge evidence of them in the conservatively minded Aberdeen where I trained. On the other hand, its world of medicine seemed to be in a permanent state of transformation.

‘Did you like change when you were training?’ I asked an old nursing colleague recently.

‘Yes. That went on all the time. I especially liked that,’ she said, ‘but I do wonder if today’s training equips students for the harsher reality of working in wards. Helping patients to cope with their own unwanted frailty demands an ability for their nurse to empathise with them. That experience won’t come in a lecture hall.’ She went on, ‘But, remember how hard we had to work? Night duty with only one sister for the whole hospital as back up, was a nightmare of responsibility. And sometimes during the day we’d to spend an awful lot of the time, cleaning.’ She laughed as she added, ‘If you were caught speaking to a patient you’d obviously time on your hands so you’d be sent off to clean a cupboard, probably already clean. I bet nurses nowadays would wonder why we just did as we were told.’

My own recall of that time was that Matrons reigned over our universe: Sisters: their wards. Whilst doing the odd bit of bowing and scraping to senior medical staff, they weren’t averse to sorting out the more junior ones, meanwhile ruling over their fiefdom with a responsibility for everyone from kitchen maid to patient. They also oversaw a nursing care which, despite the changing demands, seemed more basic: less complicated; surely more rewarding.

There were no computers then of course. The key skill was in the observation of our patients. This has given me such a clear recall of so many, they’ve found their way into the pages of my memoirs.

I loved Jennifer Worth’s Call the Midwife book. It’s wonderful that it’s been translated so well into the popular television series. The 1950s life in an under privileged area is sensitively portrayed. It shows a tightly knit community of people in troubled times when district nurses played a significant role and were part of it. The programme gives a gentle insight into a way of life long gone but to which I can relate. In terms of community involvement, working as a district nurse in the Scottish Highlands in the 1960s wasn’t so very different and was surely as rewarding. You really did get to know your patients.

Less enjoyable is the recent headlined news stories of poor nursing care. Since health affects us all, it’s no wonder people are concerned. But today’s media brings an awareness we didn’t have in the past. (Think Female First!) so the information’s out there and where it should be.

Nursing in the 1960s wasn’t perfect but looking back, I’m aware of a less litigious time where cleanliness was God and paperwork and form-filling considered a small and incidental nuisance.

The End.

Read my interview with Jane Yeadon on It Won't Hurt a Bit and It Should't Happen to a Midwife! 


by for www.femalefirst.co.uk
find me on and follow me on