Description:
The establishment in 1903 of a professional district nursing service in Wellington, New Zealand's capital city, was a philanthropic response to the need for skilled care for the sickpoor in their own homes, as hospital and charitable aid boards believed chronic patients drained their resources. This paper argues that it was the timely combination of the individual philanthropy of Sarah Ann Rhodes, the organisational philanthropy of the St John Ambulance Association and the new professional standing and availability of registered nurses such as Annie Holgate that ensured its successful foundation. It also argues that district nursing services blurred spatial, social, and public-private boundaries in new ways. Finally, it considers the district nurse's role as the philanthropist 's proxy, the means for realising the philanthropist's desire to help the sick poor.
Description:
All nurse researchers need to address, in the manner most appropriate to their research methodology, issues of quality related to their research material. This concern is not about the care needed in generating data, rather it relates to understanding and evaluating material that already exists. This article describes four historical sources relevant to the history of nursing in New Zealand and uses them to explain how nurse researchers can evaluate their research material. The dimensions of this evaluation are the provenance, purpose, context, veracity and usefulness of the historical sources. The article explains the questions that need to be addressed in each dimension of the evaluation. The different kinds of information available in the four historical sources are illustrated by references to individual nurses