History of Apprenticeship Nurse Training in Ireland

Gerard M. Fealy is a nurse historian and a senior lecturer in nursing at the School of Nursing and Midwifery, University College Dublin. His research interests include the history of nursing, curriculum policy and research methods. Dr Fealy is the editor of Care to Remember: Nursing and Midwifery in Ireland and the co-editor of Nursing Education in Drogheda, 1946-2004: A Commemorative History.

• Foreword 1. Introduction 2. Charity, Medical Relief, and Precursors of the Modern Nurse 3. ‘Nursing Arrangements’: Nursing policy in Dublin in the late nineteenth century 4. Hospitals in Transition: Two case studies of nursing reform 5. ‘Exemplary Conduct and Character’: The lady nurses of the Dublin hospitals 6. Professional Regulation and the General Nursing Council for Ireland 7. ‘Knowledge of her Work’: The curriculum, c. 1899–1949 8. The Nursing Board and the Training Experience, 1950–1979 9. From the Hospital to the Academy, 1980–1994 10. Conclusions

Between the 1950's and 1990's, what Fealy surprises us with is how authorities continued to resist reducing the clinical hours stuident nurses maintained. In addition, he makes a strong arguement that the unwillingness to move nursing education out of the hospital only prolonged Ireland's failure to standardize nurse training. Dr Margaret Preston - Nursing History