17
can offer no decided opinion as to the probable extent of the saving so effected.
2. Your Committee believe that accommodation equal at least, if not superior, to that afforded to the nurses in the London hospitals, can be provided in the Workhouse at a moderate outlay. It is estimated that, for the male hospital, a sum of from 400l. to 500l. would suffice to provide the rooms and to furnish them.
3. With reference to the supply of suitable nurses, your Committee have to report that, as the authorities of the Nightingale Training School for nurses have offered to render to the Select Vestry all the assistance in their power in obtaining trained nurses, no great difficulty on this point need be apprehended.
Were your Committee as sanguine as some of the hospital authorities whom they have consulted, as to the happy results to be expected from the introduction of trained nurses into the Workhouse, they would at once, with the utmost confidence, recommend that the whole of the hospital should, at the cost of the parish, be supplied with this class of officers; but, looking upon it as they do, as an experiment (at least in its economical results), they unanimously recommend that the system should, in the first instance, be tried in the male hospital
May 5, 1864.
The report of the Sub-Committee met with the approval of the Vestry. Some delay in the adoption of its recommendations was caused by a severe outbreak of fever in the town, which for the time absorbed all the resources of the Vestry and its officers. But on the 18th of May, 1865, a Lady Superintendent who had received a thorough training at Kaiserswerth and St. Thomas's, twelve Nightingale nurses from St. Thomas's, eighteen probationers,
