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- the Indian Service can pay salaries sufficiently high to keep all its
public health nursing positions filled with persons who have met
these standards and who show in the probationary period that they
possess the character and personality for work with Indians, it will
have made a marked advance. The Service should resist the temptation to reduce these standards because of difficulties in securing
and keeping persons who can meet them at the salaries paid. The
new entrance salary of $1860 should prove satisfactory if arrangements can be made to advance the salary of the successful nurses
fairly systematically until they reach a reasonable maximum.
Whenever possible, the Indian Service should cooperate with local, state, county, and city health authorities in utilizing their public health nurses by sharing a reasonable proportion of the expense attached thereto. In all such instances, the ratio of nurses to unit of population should be such that efficient work could be done.
The housing facilities made available for nurses should be comfortable and reasonably well furnished, and located at a point convenient to their activities. Hospital nurses should have quarters outside the hospital.
The Practice of Preventive Medicine and Public Health in the Indian Service. The medical and health service of the Indian Service in its operation has as a rule been curative and not, as has been asserted to be the case for some years past, educational and preventive. In fact, it has to a great extent been merely palliative in practice. The major single exception of a general character has been the widespread campaign for vaccination against smallpox.
Lack of Preventive Program. The findings that substantiate this statement are as follows:
- Until the past year or so trained public health personnel has not been permanently employed by the Indian Service. This personnel embraces physicians, epidemiologists, and nurses, with adequate clerical assistance for each.
years’ private duty postgraduate experience in nursing; (4) evidence of state registration, and (5) at least four months’ postgraduate training in public health or visiting nursing at a school of recognized standing, or in lieu of such training, one year of full-time paid experience under supervision in public health or visiting nursing. This special training or experience under (5) may be: included as part of the periods called for under (3).