Lably
Skip to content

Nursing in Canada

  • 17 min read
  • 6 chapters

Related on Lably

Through Canada, Starvation and Montreal

Lab · Class 8–12Microorganisms

The role that nurses have played in the development of Canada has been recognized through the designation of seven National Historic Sites of Canada related to nursing. Five nurses' residences (the Ann Baillie Building, Begbie Hall, the Hersey Pavilion, the Pavillon Mailloux and the St. Boniface Hospital Nurses' Residence) were designated in commemoration of the growing professionalism of nursing and of the expanded role of nurses in health care over the course of the 20th century. The La Corne Nursing Station and the Wilberforce Red Cross Outpost were designated, in part, in honour of the role played by nurses in delivering health care to isolated areas.

Nurses in every setting demonstrate their commitment to continually improving their nursing practice by annually engaging in a written reflection, an analysis of the year, and 2 learning goals. Every nurse registered in the General or Extended class is required, under the Registered Health Professions Act, 1991, to participate in the Quality Assurance (QA) program.

History

In 1617, Marie Rollet (1580-1649) arrived in New France with her husband, Louis Hébert, Québec's first apothecary. She became New France's first laywoman, by working with her husband to tend to those who were suffering from starvation and illness, including natives.

In 1639 in Quebec, Augustine nuns worked to open a mission that cared for people's spiritual and physical needs. This mission created the first nursing apprenticeship program in North America.

In the nineteenth century, some Catholic nursing orders spread their message across Canada. Most nurses were female and had only occasional consultation with a physician. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, hospital care and medical services improved and expanded. Much of this was due to Nightingale's influence. In 1874 the first formal nursing training program was started at the General and Marine Hospital in St. Catharines in Ontario.

In 1641, Jeanne Mance, a nurse from Langres, France, arrived at Fort Ville-Marie, New France. She was recruited by Father Charles Lallemant, a Jesuit priest, for the Société Notre-Dame de Montréal. In 1642, she established the Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal, one of the oldest hospitals in North America.

In 1737, Marie-Marguerite d'Youville founded the Sisters of Charity of Montreal, a religious order known as the Grey Nuns. In 1747, they were granted a charter to operate the General Hospital of Montreal. The order went on to expand to other cities across North America and is still in existence today. In 1990, she was canonized by Pope John Paul II, and is the first native-born Canadian to be elevated to sainthood by the Roman Catholic Church.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, women made inroads into various professions including teaching, journalism, social work, and public health. These advances included the establishment of a Women's Medical College in Toronto (and in Kingston, Ontario) in 1883, attributed in part to the persistence of Emily Stowe, the first female physician to practise in Canada. Stowe's daughter, Augusta Stowe-Gullen, became the first woman to graduate from a Canadian medical school.

From 1884 to 1910, Mary Agnes Snively was the Superintendent of Nurses at the Toronto General Hospital's School of Nursing, where she established the first nursing student residence and a proper curriculum. In 1908, she became the first president of the Canadian Society of Superintendents of Training Schools for Nurses. She was also a co-founder of the International Council of Nurses and served as their Honorary Treasurer from 1900 to 1904.

Apart from a token few, women were outsiders to the male-dominated medical profession. Midwifery—practised along traditional lines by women—was restricted and practically died out by 1900. Even so, the great majority of childbirths took place at home until the 1920s, when hospitals became preferred, especially by women who were better educated, more modern, and more trusting in modern medicine.

Prairie province settlement

In the Prairie provinces, the first homesteaders relied on themselves for medical services. Poverty and geographic isolation empowered women to learn and practise medical care with the herbs, roots, and berries that worked for their mothers. They prayed for divine intervention but also practised supernatural magic that provided as much psychological as physical relief. The reliance on homeopathic remedies continued as trained nurses, doctors, and how-to manuals slowly reached the homesteaders in the early 20th century.

After 1900 medicine, and especially nursing, modernized and became well organized.

The Lethbridge Nursing Mission in Alberta was a representative Canadian voluntary mission. It was founded, independent of the Victorian Order of Nurses, in 1909 by Jessie Turnbull Robinson. A former nurse, Robinson was elected as president of the Lethbridge Relief Society and began district nursing services aimed at poor women and children. The mission was governed by a volunteer board of women directors and began by raising money for its first year of service through charitable donations and payments from the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. The mission also blended social work with nursing, becoming the dispenser of unemployment relief.

Richardson (1998) examines the social, political, economic, class, and professional factors that contributed to ideological and practical differences between leaders of the Alberta Association of Graduate Nurses (AAGN), established in 1916, and the United Farm Women of Alberta (UFWA), founded in 1915, regarding the promotion and acceptance of midwifery as a recognized subspecialty of registered nurses. Accusing the AAGN of ignoring the medical needs of rural Alberta women, the leaders of the UFWA worked to improve economic and living conditions of women farmers. Irene Parlby, the UFWA's first president, lobbied for the establishment of a provincial Department of Public Health, government-provided hospitals and doctors, and passage of a law to permit nurses to qualify as registered midwives. The AAGN leadership opposed midwife certification, arguing that nursing curricula left no room for midwife study, and thus nurses were not qualified to participate in home births. In 1919 the AAGN compromised with the UFWA, and they worked together for the passage of the Public Health Nurses Act that allowed nurses to serve as midwives in regions without doctors. Thus, Alberta's District Nursing Service was created in 1919 to coordinate women's health resources of the province. Alberta's District Nursing Service developed chiefly from the organized and persistent political activism of UFWA members and only minimally from the actions of professional nursing groups that were clearly uninterested in rural Canadians' medical needs.

The Alberta District Nursing Service administered health care in the predominantly rural and impoverished areas of Alberta in the first half of the 20th century. Founded in 1919 to meet maternal and emergency medical needs by the United Farm Women (UFWA), the Nursing Service treated prairie settlers living in primitive areas lacking doctors and hospitals. Nurses provided prenatal care, worked as midwives, performed minor surgery, conducted medical inspections of schoolchildren, and sponsored immunization programs. The post-Second World War discovery of large oil and gas reserves resulted in economic prosperity and the expansion of local medical services. The passage of provincial health and universal hospital insurance in 1957 precipitated the eventual phasing out of the obsolete District Nursing Service in 1976.

Military service

Over 4000 women served as nurses in uniform in the Canadian Armed Forces during the Second World War. They were called "Nursing Sisters" and had already been professionally trained in civilian life. However, in military service they achieved an elite status well above what they had experienced as civilians. The Nursing Sisters had much more responsibility and autonomy, and had more opportunity to use their expertise than civilian nurses. They were often close to the front lines, and the military doctors – all men – delegated significant responsibility to the nurses because of the high level of casualties, the shortages of physicians, and extreme working conditions.

Sign in to keep reading

5 more chapters are free with a Lably account.

More in Health

Food and Drug AdministrationFederal agency of the United States Department of Health and Human ServicesCenters for Disease Control and PreventionUnited States government public health agencyNauseaMedical symptom or conditionSeizurePeriod of symptoms due to excessive or synchronous neuronal brain activityVomitingExpulsion of stomach contents via the mouth or noseIntravenous therapyMedication administered into a vein