Medicine: Nurse Betty

At the biennial U.S. nurses’ convention in Atlantic City last week, the 12,000 delegates had plenty to talk about: low pay and long hours (their slogan: “$50 for 40 hours”); an A.F.L.-C.I.O. drive to unionize them (the nurses decided to bargain exclusively through their state associations); a critical U.S. nurse shortage (hospitals need at least 75,000 more). To see a nurse at work, TIME spent a day with one of the delegates’ 300,000 constituents, Nurse Betty (name withheld at her request).

At 7 o’clock one morning last week, Betty, R.N., dark-eyed, 23-year-old head nurse on obstetrical service, reported for duty at her desk in the drafty fifth-floor corridor of a big hospital facing Manhattan’s Central Park. Nurse Betty took a quick inventory of her patients: 19 babies packed neatly in pink blankets, 15 mothers in the crowded ward, four in the “private” room. “I’ve got to get three of them out of here today,” she said.

Across the hall, behind a white screen, a young Chinese girl moaned and cried in her first labor. Betty snaked a stethoscope out of her desk and went to listen to the girl’s fetal heart beat. By the time she had taken it, the nursery was squalling in full chorus. Betty hurried in, picked up a few babies, bounced them about affectionately and popped them back into their baskets. “We spoil the children as much as we have time for,” she observed. The Chinese girl was shrieking now. Betty went to prepare a sedative, but was interrupted by arrival of the mothers’ breakfast trays. While she distributed them and gave the Chinese girl an injection, the house phone rang six times, two doctors asked for reports, the nursery redoubled its howl and two student nurses reported for instructions.

In the Day’s Work. Betty assigned one student nurse to the mothers and the other to help get the babies ready for breakfast. She filled out a laundry list, checked the drug list, sent for the day’s linen supply, directed attendants in a ward cleanup, emptied wastebaskets, filled water pitchers and was on hand when the baby nurses wheeled a big baby truck into the ward. As the nurses loudly read each baby’s name from its identification bracelet, each mother claimed her own.

By this time the Chinese girl was on the verge, ahead of the doctor’s schedule. Betty telephoned him. The doctor’s office replied crossly that there was plenty of time. Betty gave the patient another hypodermic, dispatched her to the delivery room.

At 9:30, while the babies nursed, Betty had ten minutes’ breathing spell. It was the day’s last. Too busy to follow a routine, she made beds, nursed the sickest patients, washed gloves, instructed student nurses (mostly by example), admitted new patients. At 5 p.m., tottering home to the four-room Manhattan apartment which she shares with two other nurses, Betty propped her tired feet on two pillows and promptly fell asleep.

Learning & Doing. Betty is young for a head nurse. A comely, sturdy New Jersey lawyer’s daughter, she wanted to be a doctor, took a pre-med course at the University of Vermont—until her brother also decided to study medicine and preempted the limited family funds. She got her nursing education (a standard three-year course) at the hospital where she works.

Like all hospital nurses, Betty works a killing schedule: a 48-hour, six-day week, frequent overtime (without extra pay or time off), no holidays, no rest periods. Her pay: $170 a month (plus lunches). Out of this, she buys her own uniforms ($8.98), caps ($1.50) and hospital shoes ($8).

At Betty’s hospital, typically understaffed (by 50%), there is one nurse for every ten beds (ideal: five beds). Said Betty and her colleagues: much of their time is taken by work that could be done just as well by a practical nurse or by a cleaning woman. (Said the hospital: cleaning women are as hard to find as nurses.)

Betty has no time for heavy thinking on the Nursing Problem. But she observes that somewhere, somehow, a little better management is needed. And more nurses.