Report of the Working Party on the Recruitment and Training of Nurses.

Date:
1947
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Report of the Working Party on the Recruitment and Training of Nurses. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    25/132 (page 17)
    CHARTER. 1¥ Intelligence of Nurses 49. In the two preceding chapters we were concerned with the size of the nursing profession, and with its qualitative structure in terms of age, educational background, professional qualifications and socio-economic status. We turn now to a particular qualitative aspect—the mental calibre of the nursing profession. The level of intelligence or educability ‘of the potential nurse is of decisive importance, both as regards her training and professional practice. A training programme on scientific lines is one which matches training requirements on the one hand, to the capacities of the trainees on the other. The aim is for the student to acquire that knowledge, skill and aptitude which will equip her for nursing duties. Since her intellectual capacity is an index of her ability to acquire this knowledge and skill, it follows that an accurate assessment of capacity is a necessary part of the procedure of selection for training. As regards the trained nurse, it is clear that her general intellectual competence will have a direct bearing on the efficiency with which she discharges her function which is to reduce the incidence and duration of sickness. 50. It is an accepted fact that there are considerable differences between indi- viduals in their inborn mental capacity. The special value of intelligence tests is that they enable us to estimate this capacity fairly accurately in, say, an hour, a task which might otherwise take weeks, months, or even longer. Individual differences in capacity to respond to training are thus readily measurable by means of suitable tests. The principles involved, and the corollaries, are accepted in civil and service life, wherever the need arises to select individuals for diverse courses of training, and a large body of evidence exists which shows that the use of intelligence and other mental tests can contribute appreciably to reduce the extent and cost of wastage during training. Recent experience in the armed forces, in the United Kingdom as in other countries, has amply confirmed the conclusions already reached in education and industry before the war, regarding the worth of mental tests in effective selection for training. 51. Wastage during training occurs not simply from demanding too much of the duller student, who gives up the unequal struggle when confronted with too difficult a task ; it arises also from lack of appreciation of the gifts of the brighter student. Asa recent U.S. Report* points out, the waste of some natural resources may be condoned in the hope that science will discover a substitute equally good. Intelligence is unique in this respect. No substitute can be found to replace it. 52. Survey of nurses’ intelligence. With this background in mind, we have carried out a survey of the intelligencet of the nursing profession. The results set out in this chapter are based on tests administered to 2,400 hospital nurses, both male and female, including 697 trained nurses and midwives, 1,466 student nurses and pupil midwives, and 237 assistant and other nurses. Far more than 2,400 nurses were actually tested, but the results with which we are concerned were chosen so as to be representative of each grade of nurse in each type of hospital in each region. This group—some 2 per cent. of the total number * Science The Endless Frontier, Dr. V. Bush. U.S. Govt. Printing Office. 1945. + We employ the word “ intelligence” in the psychologist’s sense of an inborn factor determining all-round general ability.