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Educational Preparation For Nursing Education

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The modern nursing profession has relied on the evolution of nursing education to shape the knowledge and ideals of its practitioners. However, nursing education was not always at the level and quality it is today. It took the hard work of historical nursing leaders to change the course of nursing education. One of these leaders, May Adelaide Nutting, was instrumental in expanding nursing education during the turn of the 20th century. Her work inspired new ideologies concerning nursing education and implemented novel nursing practices, both of which have helped to shape nursing education today. In the later years of the nineteenth century, hospitals primarily managed nursing education in the form of training schools. Though described as schools, there was little formal instruction, and the students served mostly as a cheap labor force (Nutting, 1926; Reverby, 1987). Mary Adelaide Nutting recognized the need for better educational preparation for nurses in order to help advance the nursing profession and began implementing changes to the training school model when she became the superintendent of nurses at the Johns Hopkins Hospital Training School. In this role, Nutting set out to enhance the training program to provide better educational preparation for the students. She argued that the current structure served only the hospital’s needs, and she emphasized that nursing was the only profession without true educational preparation for its pupils (Nutting, 1926). Nutting

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