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Another nursing education pioneer Yvonne Shadbolt passed away this month. Professor Liz Smythe pays tribute to the nursing leader who had a vision for a new era of nurse training and founded the forerunner of AUT's nursing school nearly 40 years ago.

Yvonne Shadbolt was an extraordinary woman. She left school before she was 15 in her quest to become economically independent. In the era of the polio epidemic she figures she had about one and a half year’s secondary education.

Her first job was with Routley’s Reliable Remedies, “putting ointments in small jars without any air bubbles”. At 16 she went nurse aiding at Rawene: “I had wanted to be a nurse for as long as I remembered”. It took her several years of adventuring (“I got lots of skills including cutting up 10 pound of fruit cake in the Railway Refreshments rooms in Paikakareki”) before she finally did her nurse training at Whangarei. She recalled one story:  “I once got 95% in a nursing exam which was all about sponging somebody. I lost the 5% because I had closed the windows and the curtains and at the end of three pages I had forgotten to open them again”. It is no surprise that fair and valid assessment became a passion for Yvonne.

 In 1958 she became the assistant tutor in the first of the new nursing curriculum classes that radically included psychology and sociology. She then travelled overseas, came back and worked in an Infectious diseases ward, planned to go into Public Health but was headhunted to return to teaching. When she resisted, saying she had no qualifications whatsoever, she was told “Have you heard of this extension course that’s up at the university; two years. It’s got psychology, economics, statistics, demographics. You sit papers in them and you get the certificate.”

In 1966 she applied for the then New Zealand School of Advanced Nursing Studies (SANS): “It was also perfectly plain if you didn’t get a hat and a pair of gloves your chances of getting in were not good”. Yvonne was accepted: “What SANS did was professionalise me”. She still did not have School Certificate. In 1966, when to her horror she was advised to go back and get that qualification, she instead enrolled in a BA, doing units part-time, and completing it with a full-time year of  stage three education papers in 1972. She was one of the few nurses studying in that era.

Her plan was continue on to do her masters (which she later completed) but instead a new nursing school was opened at Middlemore Hospital and Yvonne was called on to assist. Meanwhile moves were afoot to remove nursing schools from the hospital setting (where students provided the workforce) and to initiate new ncurricula within the polytechnic sector. In 1973 the first school was established at Wellington Polytechnic under Judith Christensen. In late 1974, at very short notice, Yvonne was called upon to begin the new comprehensive programme at what was then Auckland Institute of Technology (now AUT: the Auckland University of Technology)

Yvonne saw that much of nursing was based on habit, that routines were safeguards in an era when the care could be provided by the first year nurse or a third year nurse. She had a vision for how nursing could be so different when all the care providers where registered nurses:

I really wanted students to think of a topic and look at it, exam it, do some testing of it. Not everybody wanted to ‘think’. Most people wanted: ‘give me the facts mam just give me the facts’. I continued to take the opportunity to promote thinking when I could. All the best times of my teaching life were when people came up to me and said, ‘I always wondered what you were going on about. Now I know and now I understand."

The new programmes were greeted with much concern from people who imagined a student could go through the three years never having given a bedpan. Yvonne ensured the students were in the clinical settings from their first weeks. “I can’t believe the way people treated our students, they were awful. If you are talking about bravery you have to talk about the first students; they were truly brave”.

As Head of School, Yvonne is remembered for her Philosophy meetings. She was a firm believer that every organisation had its own shape that was underpinned by the values brought by the teaching team. Therefore, each new member of the ever-growing team had to be brought on board, yet she was always open to the insights of fresh voices.

In later years at AUT Yvonne stepped up to become the first Dean of the Faculty of Health. She went on to bring her guidance and influence to other disciplines. She rooted us firmly in a culture where how learning happens matters, thinking matters, fair and valid assessment matters, values matter, students matter, because all of that impacts the nature and quality of health care.  She retired from AUT in the early 1990s.

Yvonne was a woman of vision who boldly enacted new ways. She took on the call to lead even when she herself had different plans. Doing so for a significant chunk of her life “swallowed up every waking moment that I had”. Yet her work for nursing came with a deep passion and commitment.

She had courage, tenacity and a warm twinkle in her eye.

Whenever you had a conversation with her you felt like she looked you straight in the eye, totally focused on ‘you’. Somehow she drew one out to become more than one ever had been before.

Nursing and health professional education are the richer for her legacy.

There is a gathering to honour Yvonne at AUT North, Akoranga Drive, July 29^th, 3pm in AF block. Rsvp to [email protected]

Quotes are taken from an interview conducted by Liz Smythe with Yvonne Shadbolt in 2005