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Maude Storey died on March 29 this year. Debbie Andalo looks at her life and work and the legacy she has left for the nursing profession
ASK TODAY'S nursing students what they think of Maude Storey and the reaction is likely to be a shrug. Most will not have heard of her. Their puzzlement does scant justice to a pioneer who established the foundations of modern-day nursing. Ms Storey was instrumental in trainee nurses receiving full student status and establishing the first single-profession regulatory structure, and one that helps protect registered nurses today.
'She was behind what was described as the most significant changes in nurse education in the past 100 years,' says former RCN general secretary Christine Hancock. 'She set the seeds for a proper university-based education system for nurses.'
John Kelly worked with Ms Storey when she was elected RCN president for a second term from 1988 to 1990 and he was council chair. 'Today's nurses have a lot to thank her for,' he says. 'She put nurse education at the forefront of the agenda.' He believes it was the student nurse vote that gave her the four-year tenure as president. It may have been their way of thanking her for finally separating their education from employment responsibilities, he suggests, so that they became full-time students and were no longer exploited on the wards.
Dora Frost, who was RCN chaplain and a former deputy RCN president, emphasises what an achievement that was at the time: 'Student nurses were on the hospital budget. There was this conflict between them being a pair of hands on the ward and being a student nurse; sometimes the pair of hands would take over their status as students.'
Students were often left in charge of wards on night shifts, but were ill-equipped for such responsibility. 'Maude was part of the general movement in nursing to achieve proper protected status for nurses. The nurses were taken off the payroll of the employing authorities and educated as they are now today.'
Nurse education
Ms Storey challenged existing nurse education when she became the first chief executive of the UKCC in 1981. She had been a key contributor to the legislation that created the council and was adamant that nurse...