Dress for progress

Fifty years ago, nurses were required to wear uniforms like these, which meant spending a lot more time in the laundry room and getting ready for work. Source: Best Dresses 2019.

Originally published by ENA Connection, a publication of the Emergency Nurses Association

Nurse workday half a century ago involved more laundry room time, sharpening needles, other forgotten practices

By Shelly Strom ENA Connection Contributor

Getting ready for work as an emergency nurse in 1970 was vastly different than doing so today.

Back then, nurses were almost exclusively women and the job required wearing a white uniform with stockings, a dress, closed-toe leather shoes and the iconic nurses’ cap. Keeping that uniform in acceptable condition required spending time after work in the laundry room, removing blood stains, sometimes charcoal slurry and other evidence of the workday.

Today, emergency nurses rarely go home with blood-stained uniforms and shoes, and they aren’t tending to stitches in their hand, the result of cuts from shattered glass medication vials.

These and many other occurrences, considered the norm 50 years ago, have been abandoned. And while safety was a major determining factor, the increase of comfort and utility since then can’t be overlooked. Read more. For the complete text, please contact me.