where was allnurses.com when...

We have had several "Remember When" nursing threads over the years. Enjoy these gems:

2004: So what WAS nursing like in the "good old days"?

2005: The Bad Old Days

2008: Remember the Geri-Chair?

2010: Nursing the old fashioned way

2012: Article: "The Good Ol' Days!"

OH that poster is ME!!! almost.

Lol, another older nurse and i were recently trading "Remember when..." stories, and were considering starting a thread on them,

if only to horrify the younger nurses with things we USED TO think were great ideas, ha ha!!!

I love this. LOL I was deprived of AN in my childhood. HA HA HA

Yes we do have other "Remember when......" threads.

The most recent one is an article called Nursing: Then and Now. Be sure to stop by that thread and add your stories from the past.

NO kidding right? Remember trying to mkae head or tails out of those 10, page hand written care plans...... Looking up every drug in 3 different books.....man what I could have done with the internet!!!! The HOURS and HOURS at the library......I felt I should have moved in.....

NO kidding right? Remember trying to mkae head or tails out of those 10, page hand written care plans...... Looking up every drug in 3 different books.....man what I could have done with the internet!!!! The HOURS and HOURS at the library......I felt I should have moved in.....

We lived @ school--the library was on the 1st floor, I was on the 5th. And we could never miss a class or clinicals due to the weather--the dorm was connected to the hospital via a tunnel!

I just can't believe we are the age of the nurses, that I, as a very young nurse was absolutely terrified of. Our nightime nurse house officer wore a cape, and I thought if she arched her eyebrow in my direction she was going to march down the hall and fire me! Why? It didn't matter, she was just going to fire me, that's all!

It just cracks me up to think that odds are if there had been an allnurses back then she may have got online and cut up and had fun like we do and > some of us (though not me) are DONs! She may have even mentioned a 3 to 11 nurse who always looked terrified when all I ever said to her was "can you work a double tonight?"(that is all she ever said to me). The perspective of time reveals so much. . .

Here's another throwback thread with some great stuff in it. My favorite was the way the UK nurses would place a flower in the hands of the deceased as part of post-mortem care .

. .You know you're Old School when...

Here's another good thread on changes in nursing over the years:

How Has Nursing Changed Since You Were Pinned?

Do you feel that the nurses today are trained as well as they were when you had to hit the books and dig the info out?

I'm just interested in everyone's opinion.

From a purely technical point of view I think nurses are probably better trained now because current information is so much easier to access. It takes about a quarter of the time to access information now as it did even 15 years ago. The internet, the web, PCs, laptops, smartphone apps, Kindle and on it goes.

That pattern is really a continuation of a constant evolution though, as I recently discovered when I saw a training video for pediatric nurses produced in the 1940s. As a nurse trained in the 1970s, I laughed because the video depicted the nurse handing out hair ribbons and moving very slooooooowly . . .

You could argue that the time required in unearthing information in the past created a more diligent learner, but my view is that you still have to be just as diligent now, but your task is to sort out what is important in the avalanche of instantly available information, which is just as arduous to me.

There are multiple components to the training of nurses, though. Things like professional behavior, ethics, and the not well-defined term of "nursing culture" seems to have suffered through the years, but perhaps that is part of the changes in the society at large. My