New Lives for Old: The Nurse as Interpreter in the Rehabilitation of the Tuberculous

Abstract

restoration of an individual to that place in society for which he is best suited and where he can make his best contribution to the general welfare. A trained rehabilitation worker by studying the patient from the angle, as carefully as the doctor studies the physical condition, will outline a program aimed at such ultimate adjustment. Social diagnosis is as important in this disease as medical diagnosis. In making the diagnosis, the rehabilitation worker uses the interview, case records of previous educational work, experience, and leisure time interests, and gives a battery of vocational aptitude tests. Here is an actual case which illustrates where the nurse enters various phases of a rehabilitation program. We will follow through the steps in this patient's rehabilitation, explaining the processes as we proceed. Adrianna is a thoracoplasty patient, a white girl, aged twenty-five. Five years ago she entered the sanatorium upon completion of one year in commercial high school. She feared to leave the institution and requested employment by the county as a nurse's aide. She was allowed to try service on the ward. The probationary period indicated that she did not improve clinically with this type of work. The rehabilitation director then applied his varied technics to get a social x-ray. Through this procedure a counselor may determine what are the patient's best abilities (often unknown to himself) and what are the fields in which he has unusual capacities for success. For successful counseling it is essential that the patient be actively interested in the tests. When the patient is well enough to be interviewed about plans for the future and opportunity is given him to take the aptitude tests, it is the nurse who can do most to make him understand that these technics are not like the old school examinations, that they are not intelligence tests aimed to tag him as bright or dull, but that they are used to find out in what field he has the best chance for success. In the case just cited the occupational test battery disclosed that Adrianna had marked aptitudes for clerical work. After counseling interviews, she finally decided to complete the stenographic training which she had begun years before in high school. In line with these suggestions she received 100 hours of classroom instruction while in the sana-