The First Fifty Years of the New South Wales College of Nursing.
A history of the New South Wales College of Nursing.
Nursing is one of the most caring and most admired of professions. Today its practitioners enjoy a status that befits the importance and the difficulty of the work they perform. It was, however, not always so. This hard-won community respect has resulted in no small measure from the dedication and persistence of people who campaigned vigorously for official and popular recognition of the value of the job nurses do and who fought tirelessly to improve the quality and extend the scope of nurses' training and education.
Central to these processes has been the New South Wales College of Nursing, which had its genesis in 1949 with a meeting of seven dedicated and determined women in "a shabby back room" in Bligh Street Sydney and which, over more than half a century, has developed into one of the country's leading professional and educational organisations.
This book, written by two distinguished nurse academics, chronicles the development of the College, from its struggling beginnings, through successive triumphs and setbacks, to its present position of established prominence. The story it tells reflects on many aspects of nursing practice, as well as on a wide range of events and social issues that have had an impact on the lives and experiences of nurses in New South Wales.
It is a human as well as an institutional history and in its pages the reader will encounter a variety of characters-from within nursing and the wider medical world, as well as from politics, education and business-who have contributed in varying degrees to the formation and development of this prestigious College and so helped to ensure that it became, emphatically, "a voice to be heard".
