Florence Nightingale and William Rathbone, a Liverpool philanthropist, worked together to create the first school of nursing in Liverpool, which at the time was the second in the country. Here, an overview of the nursing education system is given. How does this differ from the way nurses are educated in your country/region?

Optional Reading

Follow the link below to access more detail of the origins of nurse education in Liverpool. This will provide more detail of nurse education in Liverpool at this time.

It should be noted that this early school (perhaps the first in England) was founded thirty years before the Nightingale school at St Thomas Hospital, and eleven years before Elizabeth Fry launched her pioneering Institution of Nursing Sisters in 1840. The operation of the Liverpool school and Mrs Fry’s organisation was basically similar. They wished to supply respectable nurses, and both relied on outside hospitals to train them. For many years, Elizabeth Fry’s institution concentrated on nursing rich private families. The rich did not use hospitals at this time, but were treated in their homes. In contrast, the Rev. Hornby specifically also included the provision of hospital nurses. The importance of the short-lived Liverpool school lay not in its achievements, but in the recognition of its fundamental flaw – its failure to retain trained nurses – and the attempts to rectify this problem by the nursing reformers who followed.

A School for Nurses Founded in Liverpool in 1829. Richard Huntsman, Mary Bruin and Carolyn Gibbon.