“Everything Possible Is Being Done”: Labour, Mobility, and the Organization of Health Services in Mid-20th Century Newfoundland

Abstract

This article is the Presidential Address to the 2018 meeting of the Canadian Society for the History of Medicine at the University of Regina. It examines the organization of the nursing service in Newfoundland during the 1950s and 1960s, as well as the recruitment and retention of nurses in cottage hospitals and nursing stations in outport communities. A number of interconnected strategies were used by the Newfoundland government to staff the nursing service, including recruiting internationally educated nurses, adjusting expectations with respect to registration standards, and using both trained and untrained workers to support nurses’ labour. Although this article is intended more as a reconnaissance suggesting the possibilities of such research, it does analyze the interconnected issues of geography, funding and pay, the nursing shortage, and the renegotiation of nursing labour that characterized this period. Furthermore, although this is a case study of Newfoundland and Labrador, it is worth considering how, or whether, the linked strategies used in the province were transferable to other communities across rural, remote, or northern Canada.