When was american nurses association established

History of the ANA In September of members of ten nursing alumnae fewer than twenty nurses met near New York City to organize a national professional association for nurses. Find a Program Now! Enroll today in an accredited DNP program while openings are still available. Choose a degree level:. District of Columbia. New Jersey. New Mexico. New York. North Carolina. North Dakota. South Carolina.

South Dakota. West Virginia. Resource Center. Grace is a Family Nurse Practitioner, a nursing professor, and a nurse scientist. Read helpful articles by Grace at our Resource Center. Check out our most recent articles for those considering a DNP degree. In the United States, family-centered sickness care remained traditional until the nineteenth century.

Sick care delivered by other than family and close acquaintances was generally limited to epidemics and plagues that periodically swept through towns and cities.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, urbanization and industrialization changed the way in which—and in many cases the place in which—sick individuals received care. Hospitals began to proliferate to serve those who were without the resources to provide their own care, and as hospitals increased in numbers so did the demand for caregivers who would be able to deliver thoughtful care to the patients in them.

Early nineteenth-century hospitals were built mainly in more populated sections of the country, generally in large cities. Nursing care in these institutions differed enormously. In hospitals operated by religious nursing orders, patients received high quality care. But, in other institutions, nursing care was more variable, ranging from good in some hospitals, to haphazard and poor in others.

Click on the image to read a pdf of the full text. In Valentine Seaman, a New York physician, organized an early course of lectures for nurses who cared for maternity patients. An early nineteenth-century program, the Nurse Society of Philadelphia also referred to as the Nurse Charity of Philadelphia trained women in caring for mothers during childbirth and postpartum period. Its founder, Dr. This publication, which each Nurse Society nurse received, represents an early example of a nursing practice text.

Between and the Nurse Society employed about fifty nurses, establishing an early practice of engaging nurses for care of patients in the home. The outbreak of the Civil War created an immediate need for capable nurses to care for the enormous number of sick and wounded.

About 20, women and men served as nurses in both the North and the South. The commendable service rendered by Civil War nurses provided a rationale for future experiments in setting up training programs for nursing. Similar courses, such as that offered by the New England Hospital for Women and Children were begun in other locales.

Philadelphia Hospital School of Nursing, first graduating class, Chief Nurse Alice Fisher is fourth from the right, second row from the bottom. The year was a watershed year in American professional nursing history. These three programs, all based on ideas advanced by Florence Nightingale, are generally acknowledged to be the forerunners of organized, professional nurse education in the United States.

By , somewhere between to schools of nursing were in operation in the country. These programs followed a fairly typical pattern. The school was either affiliated with or owned by a hospital that provided the students with the clinical experience considered necessary for the education of a nurse.

Students received two to three years of training. While in the program students carried out the majority of patient care activities offered in the hospital, receiving only a modicum of classroom education in the form of lectures on patient care and related subjects. At the end of the educational program, students received a diploma and were eligible to seek work as a trained nurse. Two nurses in the J. William White private operating room, Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, These early nurse education programs were, in reality, little more than apprenticeship programs that used student nurses for their labor.

Despite their significant shortcomings, however, they proved very popular with both hospitals and students and created a pattern of hospital-based nurse education that persisted until the mid-twentieth century.

And, while many disparaged the exploitative nature of the nurse education system, the presence of trained nurses with their emphasis on cleanliness, orderliness and close observation of patients successfully transformed hospitals into scientific institutions of caring. Schools of nursing did improve over time. Better oversight of nursing educational programs by state licensing boards as well as the increasingly complex demands of patient care led the schools to increase the amount of theoretical instruction and decrease the amount of direct work performed by students.

As the number of nurses grew in the late nineteenth century, nursing took on the rudimentary characteristics of a profession. State nurses associations also organized and were instrumental in passing state nurse registration acts which regulated and provided a licensing system for nursing practice.

The successful passage of nurse registration acts, considered a significant legislative accomplishment at a time when women held little political power, also provided nurses with their modern legal title, registered professional nurses RN. These changes improved and reformed many aspects of the nurse training system, but problems remained. Reflecting the social and legal status of African Americans at the time, American professional nursing maintained strict racial segregation until the mid-twentieth century.

African American individuals wanting to become nurses had to train in a separate educational system and faced a divided employment field in which white and black nurses did not participate equally.

Nursing also remained a predominantly female profession. While a few schools admitted men, most schools refused them admission. Employment conditions for nurses also presented challenges. In the early part of the twentieth century, hospitals employed only a few graduate nurses, mainly in supervisory positions.

They relied instead on student nurses for the majority of the bedside care provided to patients. Most nurses, once they graduated from their educational program, entered the field of private duty nursing. Private duty nurses were employed by individual patients primarily in their homes. As institutions became the more normative site for delivery of sick care, private duty nurses moved with their patients into the hospital, delivering care to hospitalized individuals who could afford to pay for their own nurse.

But for nurses, private duty often did not provide regular and dependable employment; nurses were hired on an ad hoc basis by patients and were oftentimes without a regular source of income. The cost of private duty was also quite high, limiting the number of patients employing private duty nurses.

It was not until the mid-twentieth century that hospitals hired nurses as regular staff on a permanent basis, providing full professional nursing services to all hospitalized patients. Despite the many difficulties within the profession, nursing continued to grow as an occupational field and became recognized as an essential health care service by the early twentieth century. Nurses fanned out into diverse fields delivering services to many people outside of hospitals.

July 4, celebration in Paris. About 23, American nurses served in the military, delivering care to the armed forces both in the United States and at the war front,. The success of military nurses in providing essential care during the war insured their participation in succeeding conflicts.

At home, nurses continued to provide essential service to the civilian population. The special skills possessed by nurses were easily transferred to different fields of health care. For example, nurses were educated to administer anesthesia during surgery, leading to the specialty field of nurse anesthetists. By the s, in some parts of the country, nurse-midwives delivered babies, in many cases to the most impoverished populations.

Nurse examining chest tube drainage bottles, Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, During the s and s, hospitals continued to expand adding more and more patient beds and delivering care that was rapidly becoming more complex. Nurses were the most essential ingredient in insuring that patients received competent care delivered in a safe manner.