Page:Workhouse nursing.djvu/39

29 that the Department of Nursing should be placed under the direction of a small committee of your body, and that all changes in the staff should be made only by them. From information they have received, your Committee have reason to believe that if, after the Workhouse is supplied with Nurses, the two classes of nurses, i.e. trained nurses and probationers, be maintained, the cost of the Department may be considerably lessened by training nurses for other hospitals; the cost of the probationers being either paid for by a Government grant, or by the bodies for whom the nurses may be trained.

March 15, 1867.

This report was unanimously adopted by the Workhouse Committee and by the Vestry; and already the new system has been extended to the Female Wards. It is in contemplation to extend it also to the Fever Hospital, as soon as a sufficient number of suitable nurses shall have been trained.

It will be observed that the report contemplates the training of probationers for other Workhouse Infirmaries. And it is, indeed, to be hoped that in this and other ways the Liverpool Workhouse Hospital may serve as a normal school, from which the system there adopted may spread. The special expenses of such a school would naturally be borne by the parishes which profited by its services in educating nurses for them, or by the Government. But this point is one which, as yet, has hardly demanded practical consideration.

The experiment whose results have been recorded, could hardly have been tried at all—certainly could