A centennial book interweaving the 100 years of the New Zealand Nursing Organisation with the history of nursing in New Zealand has been launched.
Freed to Care Proud to Nurse covers the history of the organisation from its early days as an Edwardian near-exclusive club of 600 nurses, to the modern organisation of nearly 45,000 nurses, midwives, caregivers and other health sector workers.
The 300 page illustrated hardcover book by author Mary-Ellen O’Conor was launched at a Matariki dinner by Whanau Ora Minister Tariana Turia.
O’Connor said in her introduction her brief was to write a readable account of the organisation’s history and not an “academic tome”.
So the book covers the organisation’s history and is also interspersed with first hand accounts by nurses, from back-blocks nursing to war fronts; from the Napier earthquake to 1950s hospital training. Some of the country’s key nurses over the century are profiled, including Nurse (Sibilla) Maude to Bee Salmon. Also the key personnel who propelled the organisation along from its first meeting in 1910 as the New Zealand Trained Nurses’ Association to its emergence as the modern New Zealand Nurses Organisation in 1993, including the inimitable Hester Maclean and Margaret Bazley.
O’Connor said dominating the history of the organisation was the tension between its professional and industrial roles which grew as the century progressed. “It was believed by nursing leadership, who were rarely challenged, that the status and rewards of nurses would be improved by a steadily growing professionalism.” However the result was pay and conditions were eroded in relation to other professions. “Not until the radical health reforms of the 1980s and 1990s, which rendered the ‘professionalism for status and rewards’ strategy woefully out of date, was the Association persuaded to become more industrially active.”
Freed to Care Proud to Nurse in covering the 100 years also looks at the organisation’s ongoing professional role, its changing relationship with government, the development of nursing education, the bicultural partnership and the parallel development of the women’s movement and push for pay equity.
O’Connor, with a strong interest in the public sector and unionism, said she relished the chance to record the development of a high-profile, female-dominated organisation reflecting the “professional, social and political currents within society”. The book can be ordered from NZNO.
