Nightingales Needed

U.S. nursing schools had last week signed up only 68% of their 1942-43 quota of 55,000 new students. School directors admit they have a tough job selling nursing as a career to girls. Next year will provide a bigger problem: the U.S. Public Health Service will ask the schools to round up 65,000 girls, because 1) the Army & Navy plan to add some 35,000 more nurses to their present staff of 20,000; 2) civilian hospitals and public-health services need 30,000 nurses.

Big snag in recruiting student nurses is competition from war industry. Whereas a student nurse must work three years for nothing (except keep), industries pay girls while training them. About half the U.S. nursing schools now charge tuition--before the depression only 15% of the schools did so, and 88% of them actually gave their students $8 to $10 a month spending money. Average tuition has risen from $45 to $75 in the last decade. And with the armed forces boasting of the cash value in civilian life of the free training they often give their men, many girls think it unfair that they must pay for nurses' training. The Federal Government will help by spending $3,500,000 on nursing education during fiscal 1942-43.

Some nursing-school directors feel that girls who are lured by ready factory wages lack the Florence Nightingale spirit, would not make good nurses anyway. But the National Nursing Council for War Service tells why girls should pass up other war jobs in favor of starched uniforms:

> Nursing is a permanent career which should still be profitable "while the girl workers in war industry will be hunting new jobs and perhaps even having to learn new skills."

> U.S. nurses go to every battlefront, will probably be called upon to handle "the vast problems of disease, malnutrition and war shock that will exist in devastated areas" after the war ("Be a nurse and see the world!").

> The future of U.S. nursing jobs is rosy: hospitals were short of nurses long before Pearl Harbor, cared for 1,500,000 more patients in 1941 than in 1940 (the U.S. is not sicklier, but members of group-payment plans, who can thus afford hospitalization for the first time, are increasing).

> "Nurses make notably capable and successful wives and mothers, and the marriage rate is high among nurses."

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