1840s - 1880s

For centuries, nursing was something done at home using traditional knowledge. St John’s House, founded in 1848, was one several Anglican sisterhoods established in Britain which sought to offer better nursing, but the job remained one for poor women, who were given no medical training.

Florence Nightingale changed all this with her belief that nursing offered challenges for respectable ladies. She won over public opinion by improving sanitation and ventilation at the Scutari military hospital during the Crimean War, so that death rates fell sharply.

Britain’s first training centre for nurses, the Nightingale School, was set up in 1860 at St Thomas’s Hospital. Nurses educated there went on to teach around the country.

1919

Many nurses now offered excellent care, but some lacked medical knowledge. The Nurses Registration Act set up the General Nursing Council to keep a list of those with proper training. Only those on the list were officially nurses.

1968

When Winifred Hector began teaching nursing at Barts Hospital in London in the 1930s, she was told to teach the male urinary tract without pictures or diagrams (deemed unsuitable for young women). But from the 1950s, her series of scientific textbooks began to modernise British nursing, and her efforts culminated in the country’s first nursing degree course, at City University, which began in 1968.

1999

A shake-up of the nursing career path established the “nurse consultant”, a senior role specialising in a particular area of care.

These new super-nurses have a basic salary of £65,000. With overtime, this can reach £100,000 a year, five times more than a newly qualified nurse.

2009

Alison Ward, who works at Harrogate District Hospital, cautiously welcomes the news that nurses would need a degree. Ms Ward has a diploma and says she would be happy to study for a degree: “I go back to university every three years anyway.” But she added: “People can be fantastic on paper; when you put them in front of patients, things are different.”

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