Historical Nursing Responses to Community Health Needs in Australia

Abstract

This chapter provides a background to understanding how both district and early public health nurses were predecessors of contemporary community nurses. Nurses have responded to the health needs of communities by becoming community-based providers of care and protection since the nursing and public health reforms of the nineteenth century. Women ‘health visitors’ or ‘trained woman inspectors’ were employed in the sanitary inspection departments of local government from around 1902. The social characteristics that Ferguson and saw as desirable in the public health nurse or health visitor also resonate with Nightingale’s wish for women nurses to have a social administration role in society. ‘Public health nurse’ continued to be a job description for nurses employed in most states and territories, in generalist, often multi-skilled roles that included health visiting, immunisation, maternal and child health, disease prevention, tuberculosis services, and venereal disease services.