What was it like to be a nurse in the 1980s

minbin · Apr 21, 2017

I beÄame an LPN in 1980. We had to wear all white..... dresses, hose, shoes and nursing caps. I can remember nurses smoking in our break rooms on the unit. We had to calculate IV drip rates and time tape all IV bags. No pumps except for certain meds. Different color ink for each shift. Team nursing. All documentation was handwritten. Patients respected you more because of the inability to "Google" everything. But we questioned doctors and advocated for our patients. As one other nurse wrote... patient satisfaction scores have replaced common sense. Maternity services are extremely family centered and "spa like." Breast feeding has become almost Nazi like in the zeal to promote "breast is best." Better education for our patients and tons more teaching before discharge.

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DoGoodThenGo · Apr 22, 2017

Pretty much anything in this post of sweetpealuvr's was virtually the same for me, even though I was a 1971 grad of a hospital nsg program.
With regards to the bed-linen changes: We had no fitted sheets, just our hospital-corners-making skills. When you changed the bed, you put the top sheet on the mattress so it became the bottom sheet, and a clean sheet for the top. There were all kinds of ways to prepare a made bed for the patient. The one I remember best is the 'surgical bed', where the sheets were arranged and folded JUST SO. Supposedly then the patient could be transferred from gurney to bed and immediately covered with one simple pull on the forward edge/corner.
There were also no disposables. We had all metal stuff...and boy oh boy did it make a LOUD sound echoing through the ward when you dropped a metal bedpan on the hard tile floor. The dressing kits were made up where they autoclaved, wrapped in brown paper which became your sterile field. Almost all of the equipment was singly wrapped, so gathering all the correct equipment required thought. No cath kits, no suture removal kits. And yes, NO gloves were allowed to be used except for surgical procedures. Otherwise you were considered to be "wasting supplies un-necessarily".
On 3-11 we also did some of the volunteers work, aid work, and housekeeping chores. BUT, the BIG difference back then was a very reasonable nurse-patient ratio and SUFFICIENT STAFFING!

Only remember/was taught three ways of making a bed; occupied, unoccupied and post-op. The last you fan folded the top sheet/blanket to left side of bed to make it easier when transferring a patient from stretcher. Post-op beds also were the only ones you left raised after it was made, again to accommodate the arrival of stretcher.

Unless the place was short on linens every bed change got a new top and bottom sheet. However yes, if linens were in short supply the top became bottom and you used only one new clean sheet. Never in my life saw a fitted sheet in hospital or nursing home. It was mitered corners all the way. Med/Surg I devoted several weeks of that first semester to learning the "nursing arts"; bed making, patient bathing (including range of motions) and so forth; things many nurses today probably consider "aides work".

No Chux in the 1980's either; you used a draw sheet with perhaps a rubber one (if you could lay hands on one) in between the layers.

There weren't any disposable wash cloths or wipes for bathing or post BM care. You used a wash cloth made from real cotton terry toweling. When finished the entire lot of BM fouled linen just went into a normal laundry bag. In fact no linen except for that coming out of isolation wards/rooms was separated. Blood, feces, urine, the lot, all linen fouled by body fluids went into a plain laundry bag with no special notations. Arrival of HIV/AIDS changed all of that.

Thankfully never had to deal with making an occupied bed with a "large" patient.

tyvin, BSN, RN · Apr 22, 2017

Capes? Whew, you people must be a liberal college. It was just like it is now, except nurse patient ratios were better and we have more responsibility now and the internet entered the stage. If you want capes try the 60's and behind (by area of course). I think that is was the 70's and 60's...

I've never had to give up my seat for a doctor...honestly, where are some of you from? Nurses scope of practice was about the same except the Nurse Practice Acts from every state like to break down delegating tasks down to a step by step: step 1-You will enter the room, step 2- Now you are in the room look at the person you will delegate the task to, step 3- Think in your head: does this person have a brain...etc.. I think there's 12 steps as opposed to 6 back then.

I think the change has also been with the nurses education and that it's been dumbed down compared to what I had to take. Also, the red tape has increased to a point that it is officially more ridiculous. The internet came out in the 80's and that whole ball of wax changed in education programs, hospitals, everywhere, and the EHR was born, bogging us down with...you guessed it, more regulations. It also opened up another field of nursing (I know you can figure this one out). Think software.

Medication administration has changed (think pyxis), we have a COW for everyone...if you really start brainstorming you can come up with all kinds of changes up to how they even give out student loans now days. There are many more areas of nursing that nurses can choose from being able to open up their own businesses. We network...that word meant something different in the 80's

Where I'm from we had disposable cloths and chucks. That should also show you how different nursing is depending on where you are.

What I find is that the regular RN does not realize their scope of practice; therefore, always practicing under their potential. How many RNs have I asked if they knew how to find their state's nurse practice act and the response is "What's a nurse practice act?" Quality education seems to be waning.

You don't have to interview someone in person to know what it was like...it's called google and there's plenty of histories on there to write an encyclopedia set on (and there's us). Good luck to you :)

Bizyfe0415 · Oct 13, 2017

Nursing in the 70's/80's. Wow. White shoes and the beginning of wearing pant suits. Paperwork was on paper with different colors of ink for each of the 3 shifts. Getting to know your patients and actually care for them. 8 hour shifts! In those early years I was a Nurse's Aide (no fancy PCA or Tech title). I worked my way through LPN school and then RN school, working weekends 3-11 on a med/surg floor for my LPN and full time 11-7 for my RN (classes were only until 11 or 12, took the nights before clinicals off.) Two 8 hour clinicals per week, by the way. No nursing lab, everything was done on a still mannequin, a classmate or a patient. We were told to stand for a doctor IF there wasn't a chair for him to sit. Very few nurses could start IV's as they were using hugely long Angiocaths, about the length of a mid-line today. Stryker Circo-Electiric beds to turn the immobile from back to stomach to prevent bedsores. And they took 2 people a bit of time to prepare for the turn, since you didn't want to drop the patient. Once I moved to the nursery, the average stay for a NSVD was 5 days, for a C/Section (classic incision was the only one) was 7 days, unless you had one particular doctor whose patients stayed 10 days. And the usual out of pocket expense wasn't much, which included the private room rate and the TV you paid for since it wasn't standard in the room. We had autoclaved baby packs of blankets, t-shirts, cloth diapers used in-between the baby and the blanket-crib cover. Babies slept on their stomachs. We wore shoe covers, took the babies out every 4 hours to their mothers and mothers only- the floor was cleared of all visitors until the revolutionary idea came out of allowing ONE- and only one- visitor to scrub and gown to stay during the feeding. They stayed an hour and came back into the nursery. Breastfeeding was rare. We stabilized the premies as much as possible before calling the doc to let him know what was going on, but if I had my tech call and just say "We need you now...." they got there because they trusted all of us nurses and our judgement at 4am. The good old days? In a way in some ways. And yes, we were advocates even then. My best example was as a student with a patient in kidney failure. His doctor, a former anesthesiologist turned pulmonologist, wanted to do a procedure our hospital had never done. (I know, the God complex.) The family wanted transfer to another hospital. I supported their decision because they were the family and even told the patient it was their right to decide, always. The doc tried to make trouble for me because I didn't back him. My instructors backed me. The director of nursing backed me. I got to wish the patient the best before his transport. Many nurses were more generalists since there wasn't specialization of departments to the degree it is now. We were PT for stroke patients, doing ROM to the affected areas. We were RT in moving the wall outlets around (not enough for one in each room, but they weren't needed by many, either, in my areas). We are the nurses who have basically had to relearn everything we studied in nursing school (not all, but a LOT) since Evidence Based studies have advanced knowledge so much. Babies sleep on their backs. No hydrogen peroxide in wounds. No Maalox/Sugar/Brown Sugar for 'bedsores' aka decubitus. Breastfeed, on demand. IV pumps instead of micro drips and microchambers for tight control of IV fluids. Patients who trusted us to tell them, teach them correctly- instead of searching Google/Bing/WebMD/Facebook for multiple opinions and facts which may or may not apply to them. Wow, I seem to have written a lot. I hope some of it is usable in your paper. Good luck in your career and may it be a passion for you all your life!! Oh, and never ever ever stop learning and being willing to change.

angeley1978, MSN · Oct 15, 2017

Not much different in the ICU environment. We worked all sorts of shifts, including 'regularly scheduled' 16 hours. Less tech, but relationships with physicians was the same as it is now. We were coping with the onset of HIV - the early days were pretty scary. Manual calculation of IV drips & all bags were time taped; pumps only on 'special' drugs. Buretrols were the norm. We mixed all our own IV meds from a plentiful stock the unit. Gloves were not the norm unless things got really messy.
Trauma patients were hospitalized 'forever'--- skeletal traction & body casts in the days prior to external fixation devices. There's nothing scarier than dealing with a CircoElectric bed for a new quadriplegic.
Really memorable?? Hospital employees' healthcare insurance was FREE- FREE care for employees & their immediate family members in the hospital clinics. Nursing & staff lounges were very smoky - in some departments, just sitting in report could trigger respiratory problems. No 'core measures' & a ton less mandatory documentation. 'Charts' were big paper trifolds.. each shift used a different color of ink to help differentiate.
Those were the days my friends . . . . .

I remember it pretty much the same way. I got Hepatitis B from a patient two months out of nursing school because we rarely wore gloves.

sarose611 · Oct 15, 2017

Things varied a lot in the 80s depending on where you were in the country, as well as where you worked. Private hospitals generally still had whites caps, nursing shoe's, white hosiery. Teaching hospitals were moving away from some of that. I worked in Texas. We had team nursing, each member having specific duties, with the RN as charge over everyone. Night nurses got a lot of scout work dumped on them, since night's were quiet "because all the patients are asleep!" Preops were admitted the night before and prepared for surgery. The overall mix of patients activities was more varied. Some very ill, some 2-3 days position, some getting tests, some preparing to discharge. I remember my floor ran 30 patients with 1-2aides, 2-3 LPN/LVNs and 1 RN. How confrontational depended on the nurse, and how questioning was received depended on the Doctor. Younger usually ok, older Doctors not so much!

TessLJ · Oct 15, 2017

I'm writing a paper for one of my classes. I have to briefly discuss what the role of the nurse was in the 1970s/80s. The only sources I can find talk about events pertaining to nursing in the 1980s.
I really want to know the experience of being a nurse in the 80s. How much respect did nurses have? Where they able to question doctors? advocate for patients?

My mother graduated nursing school in 1974 and went to work on a med-surg floor. I scampered down those hallways as a child because dad would take us up to the hospital to have lunch with her, and I know her stories.

Like someone else posted before, in her experience when the doctors arrived at the nurses' station, the nurses were expected to give up their chairs. The ability to question the doctor depended on the facility and the doctor in question. The doctors that brought big dollars into the hospital got a pass. There was one at my mother's hospital that was notorious for throwing charts at nurses.

Nurses wore caps, and she said they always got caught in the IV tubing when she was bending over the bed.

Uniform was a white dress, white cap, white hose, and white shoes. Try keeping them clean.

No one wore gloves.

She gave mouth to mouth during CPR.

Patients would often come to the hospital for a week for "testing," and would arrive with suitcases, and could be seen strolling the halls in plushy bathrobes.

IV medications came in glass bottles, and syringes were made of glass. Glass syringes and needles were sterilized and re-used.

The nurses mixed their own chemotherapy...again, no gloves were used!

Nurses smoked in the nurses' lounge, and patients smoked in their rooms.

I worked in the same hospital as my mother in the 80's as a teen, and in my observations the relationship between doctors and nurses was very collaborative. Nurses could, and did advocate for the patients. As science and technology advanced, nursing became more technical and skilled, and thus became more respected as a profession.

I went into nursing school in 1990, and we still were required to wear those stupid caps. Nothing functional about them and the only way to keep them on your head was with half a dozen bobby pins. Nursing student uniform consisted of a pinafore, and either the white dress, white hose, and shoes, or a white uniform top and white pants. Hideous! We lobbied as a class and were finally granted the right not to wear the hat during clinical, but we still had to wear it for graduation photos.

sarose611 · Oct 16, 2017

We were taught to only use gloves when necessary, as it inferred alienation with the patient. Same with isolation: only as much as absolutely needed. But we WERE supposed to wear gloves for cleaning up excrement, urine, blood, etc.

Kooky Korky, BSN, RN · Oct 16, 2017

Did you have capes? Did you live in hospital accommodation to train? Was it AT ALL like Cherry Ames? (Sorry, I love hearing about how nursing used to be). I also apologise if these questions are relevant about 50 years before the 80's, Cherry is my only insight into American nursing history and I am aware she is fictional :).

I think that was more the 50's and 60's, LOL.

featherzRN, MSN · Oct 16, 2017

I guess I made it past the 'cut'. I graduated late 80's and I wore colored scrubs, we had disposable stuff and no one wore caps..

Oh, and there was AIDS so we all (well, the newbies) wore gloves with IV's and such..

We DID do all our own blood gasses (even had a machine for it), mix vasoactive drips, and do our own 'lifts' no matter how huge the patients.. And no rapid response teams..

We did have computers also - just for labs, everything else was on paper.

Crystal-Wings, LVN · Feb 19, 2018

I wish nurses still wore caps and dresses. I went to a Catholic school for my LPN program and we had to wear caps and light blue aprons/pinafores to clinicals. I loved it! This was only a few years ago.