General hospital nursing in Sheffield during the early years of the NHS, 1948-1974.

This study examines the history of general hospital nursing in Sheffield between approximately 1948 and 1974 – the first 26 years of the operation of the National Health Service (NHS) in England. The availability of nurses in quantity and in quality, their knowledge and skills, working practices and organisation, are themes that endured during this quarter-century. This was a period when administrative and therapeutic innovation was juxtaposed with – and constrained by – resource limitations. In particular, the inability to match nursing availability to patient needs caused operational and strategic problems in developing and delivering hospital-based health care. These problems were exacerbated when innovations in nursing and medical care required new approaches to the organisation of hospital beds and equipment, which also had to be implemented in nineteenth century buildings with inadequate basic facilities. Making extensive use of archived records of Sheffield’s hospitals, the present study explores how the coalescence of these factors influenced nurses and their work, and how this contributed to continuity and change in nursing in the city’s general hospitals.