Critical Care Nursing as a Profession

Critical Care Nursing as a Profession

Critical Care Nursing as a Profession

Critical Care Nursing

Competent critical care nursing has been central to the care of people with disabilities for many centuries. Up until the nineteenth century, people who were sick or disabled because of old age, mental illness, or physical disability were usually cared for by their families at home. For the poor sick and destitute, institutional care existed in local charitable guest- or poor houses. Professional nursing care by skilled nurses who were paid for their work, either in these institutions or through visiting nursing associations, grew during the nineteenth century. At that time, patterns of living and the provision of health care changed as a result of broader social changes, such as industrialization, urbanization, and changing work and gender relationships.

Nursing As a Paid expert Occupation

The Kaiserswerth Institute served as an important inspiration to Florence Nightingale, who spent some time there in the mid-nineteenth century. She had an influential role in spreading and transforming the disciplined religious hospital apprentice training for nurses into a nonsectarian model that was fundamental to the emergence of nursing as a paid professional occupation. Most well-known for her work in the Crimean War, Nightingale fundamentally influenced the direction of nursing and nursing education in modern hospitals. Her authority evolved against the backdrop of a profound change in the public role of middle-class women. (Nelson, 1999)

The nineteenth-century humanitarian impulse that generated a new concern about the well-being of the poor provided a context for new caring roles for women. Their work and education became a matter of public debate, and an expanding economy created new work opportunities for middle-class women. They actively joined the humanitarian effort to uplift the poor and to help create a respectable working class. In this ...